The Camphor Tree of Via Panorâmica

The road came second. This camphor is very probably one of the original plantings of the Quinta do Gólgota, the 19th-century estate that Via Panorâmica Edgar Cardoso was later cut through, which makes it the survivor of a garden that has otherwise gone. Porto's city council says as much on its own record for the tree. Camphor is an East Asian evergreen, grown for the aromatic crystals distilled from its wood, and it reached Porto with the estate owners who collected the world's trees the way other people collected porcelain. This one measures around four metres in circumference at chest height and six at the base, stands 21 metres tall and spreads a crown roughly 20 metres wide. There is a healed wound low on the trunk, the kind a tree closes over decades, and the council records it as stable. Everything else around it has changed: the estate broken up, a scenic road driven along the Douro bluff, the Faculty of Architecture built next door, and the plot the tree stands on now in private hands with development potential on the municipal record. That last fact decides the visit. The land is not open and there is no way up to the trunk. You look at this tree from the pavement of the public road, and that is the whole of it. At that size it is enough, because from the roadside a camphor of four metres reads as a green wall.