The Weeping Pagoda Tree of the Café Vienés

Pamplona's own book of old trees suggests looking at this one over a coffee. It stands beside the Café Vienés in the Taconera, and the city's 2010 survey of old and singular trees calls it worth admiring while you drink one. It is a weeping, twisted form of the Japanese pagoda tree, and the book counts it among the most beautiful and spectacular in Pamplona. Nothing about it is big. The trunk is 1.5 metres round at chest height and splits three ways, and the tree stands 9.5 metres tall under a crown 10 metres across. What earns the entry is the shape, the branches bending and hanging rather than reaching. In China and Japan the species is planted beside temples and tombs. Here it gets a café terrace, in a park whose name is older than any tree in it. The Taconera is on record from 1276, and linguists read the word as a place of stumps, tocones, left by trees cut down long before. For centuries after that the ground held vineyards and cereal. Only when the city's walls were extended to take it in did trees return, and by 1558 the council had appointed a guard for the young ones planted here. Several more weeping pagoda trees grow around the Taconera, but this is the one the book chose. Nobody has dated it. If you know when it was planted, tell us.