The Lledoner del Cementiri

In Montuiri, anar al Lledoner, going to the Lledoner, is local shorthand for dying. The Lledoner is this hackberry, and it stands opposite the gate of the village cemetery, where local reporting says it has stood since at least the early 1900s. It grew with nothing competing for its light, and it shows. The Balearic register, which catalogued it in 2005, describes an ideal form: 16 metres tall, a crown spreading 20 metres, all of it carried on five primary branches. The register gives the trunk as 5.6 metres in a field labelled diameter; on a tree of this height that is almost certainly the distance round rather than across, and it is recorded here as a girth. It has not had an easy recent history. In 2011 Última Hora reported a serious disease in the tree, and in 2018 the same paper covered a special pruning carried out to treat it. The register's latest description has it in good health and good structure, so it appears to have come through. If you pass it and something looks wrong, we would like to know. Nobody has published an age. Over a century is what the village can say with confidence, and the real figure may be well beyond that. If you know of a planting record or an old photograph, tell us. Montuiri sits on the Palma to Manacor road about 25 kilometres east of the capital, and the bus between the two stops in the village.