The Tulip Tree of Quinta Primo Madeira

The crown of this tulip tree is wider than the tree is tall: 23.5 metres across against 21 metres of height. That shape only happens when a tree spends a century with nothing crowding it, which is precisely what the garden of Casa Primo Madeira has given it. Its trunk measures 4.35 metres around, and it was classified a tree of public interest on 30 November 2004, in the same gazette notice as the Atlas cedar and the plane standing a few paces away. Porto has more than one enormous Liriodendron tulipifera, which regularly confuses people. The famous one grows at Casa Tait in the Jardins do Palácio de Cristal, protected since 1950 and considerably older. This is a different tree in a different garden about 750 metres away, planted during the same 19th-century wave of estate collecting that filled this hillside with species from other continents. Tulip trees are the tallest hardwoods of the eastern American forests and among the earliest of them to reach European gardens. The flowers, greenish with an orange band and genuinely tulip-shaped, open in June high in the crown where most visitors never spot them. The moment that carries across the whole garden comes later in the year, when a canopy that wide turns clear yellow all at once and then lets it go.