The Tulip Tree of Casa Allen

Two official documents give this tree's waist as 5.24 metres and 7.75 metres. The register measured 5.24 at chest height in 2015. The 2021 news coverage of its classification gives 7.75 as the perimeter at the base. Both agree exactly on everything else, 31 metres tall with a 29 metre crown, so the gap is almost certainly about where the tape went rather than a disagreement about the tree. Either way it is a big tulip tree. Liriodendron tulipifera comes from the eastern United States, where it is the tallest hardwood of the Appalachian forest, and 31 metres is a serious height for one in Europe. The leaf is the giveaway from below: four lobes with the tip cut off square, as though someone had gone at it with scissors. No age has ever been recorded for it, by the register or by anyone else. It grows in the garden of Casa Allen, a 1920s house by the architect José Marques da Silva, now Casa das Artes and run by the Direção Regional de Cultura do Norte. The garden is genuinely open, with guided visits alongside the exhibition rooms, but it keeps the building's hours, which on most days do not begin until half past two in the afternoon. Turning up at eleven gets you a locked gate.