The Weeping Willow of the Ciudadela

Pamplona's newly-weds pick this tree for their wedding photographs, and it is a weeping willow, a species long held to stand for bitterness and unhappy love. Pamplona's 2010 book of old and singular trees reports the first fact, and its own notes on the species supply the second, without remarking on the clash. The willow grows inside the Ciudadela, the fortress the city built between 1571 and 1645, a fully walled pentagon that is now 28,000 square metres of park in the middle of Pamplona. Walls built to keep armies out now frame a backdrop for brides. It is in the book for its form and spread rather than its height. The tree is 11 metres tall with a crown 17.4 metres across, far wider than it is high, and its long thin branches, which the book notes cannot carry their own weight, hang almost to the ground. The trunk is 2.3 metres round at chest height. The species has been cultivated for so long that its origin is hard to pin down, probably China, and it puts out yellow catkins between March and May, soon after the leaves. Folklore had one more claim for it. Shelter under a weeping willow in a thunderstorm, the old belief went, and the lightning would pass you by. The book records that too. Nobody has dated this willow. If you know when it was planted, tell us.