An oak with no lobes in its leaves, and the only one of its kind alive in Catalonia.
Photo: Herodotptlomeu (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Ancient Trees in the Parc de la Ciutadella
Barcelona, Spain
This park is a fortress the city pulled down.
The citadel that gave it its name was built to hold Barcelona after 1714, demolished in the 1870s, and the ground rebuilt as the city's first public park for the Universal Exposition of 1888, which is why almost everything old here dates from one fifteen year window. A Mexican white oak went in around 1887 and is the only one of its kind alive in Catalonia. A river she-oak followed beside the Cascada around 1894, its drooping grey green needles actually jointed twigs. A silk tree has flowered every July since about 1896, well past the age its species normally reaches. The stoutest black locust in Barcelona is here, 4.3 metres around on twelve metres of tree, and so is a plane nobody has ever cut back to knuckles, which is simply what the species does when left alone.
A silk tree in a temperate climate is not built to last much past forty.
Everything about this tree says pine, and none of it is true.
Photo: Herodotptlomeu (CC BY-SA 3.0)
In fruit
In late autumn this tree drops what look like green brains onto the path.
Photo: Teresa Grau Ros (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A trunk of 4.3 metres on a tree only 12 metres tall makes this the stoutest black locust in Barcelona and the only one the city has ever put on its register.
The city register lists 273 plane trees under a single entry for the Rambles.
Photo: Clifton Ladd, C.W.B (CC BY)
This is a hedge that got away.
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