Autumn colour
At roughly 33 metres, this is one of the tallest things growing in Valencia's botanic garden, and it belongs to a species most visitors have never heard of.
Ancient Trees in the Jardi Botanic
Valencia, Spain
Valencia's university botanic garden moved to this walled plot off Carrer Quart in 1802, and thirteen of the city's monumental trees now stand inside it, more than any other single place in Valencia.
The Kashmir cypress is Bhutan's national tree, kept alive around Buddhist temples for centuries before Western botany even named it. The Caucasian elm grows nothing like an elm, its trunk breaking early into a sheaf of near-vertical branches that reads more like a bundle than a canopy. A Turkish pine went straight up for thirty metres without leaning or forking once, while a silk floss tree, a southern live oak, a Hartwiss oak, a London plane and a river she-oak fill out a collection assembled from four continents. Most of these carry no recorded planting date: the garden's own register measures trunks and crowns but keeps no year, so age here is mostly an open question left for whoever can read a ring count. The garden charges a small admission fee and is open to the public.
This tree belongs to a species that survives today largely because it has been useful to Buddhist ceremony as much as to botany.
In bloom
Break open one of this tree's seed pods and you get a handful of pillow stuffing.
This oak keeps its leaves through winter, and its timber was once worth more to a navy than to a carpenter.
No tree in this garden throws a bigger shadow.
Beekeepers know this species better than gardeners do.
Most people will never see this oak growing anywhere, including in the countries it comes from.
The garden files this tree under pino australiano, and it is not a pine.
Quercus polymorpha barely counts as a North American oak.
A date palm is supposed to grow one trunk.
This is the garden's second 'bottle tree', and it barely resembles the first.
The regional register calls this tree an American walnut, and that is close but not quite right.
This tree cannot fruit by itself.
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