The Tulip Trees of Praça Pedro Nunes

Praça Pedro Nunes is small enough to cross in twenty seconds and holds four tulip trees, each about 22 metres tall. They were classified together as one group in 2005, standing beside the former Liceu D. Manuel II, and generations of pupils came out of that building into their shade. Liriodendron tulipifera is worth identifying from the pavement. The leaf looks as though someone cut the tip off with scissors, four lobes and a flat top, unlike anything else growing on a Porto square. The flowers are genuinely tulip-shaped, greenish yellow with an orange band, and genuinely hard to see, because they open high in the crown in early summer and face upward. The register measured in 2004: trunks 3.6 metres round, 22 metres tall, crowns 17 metres across, and an age of 80, which puts the group near 100 now. One thing to know before going. The register and a 2005 survey of Porto's classified trees are the only records of this group, and no recent article or dated photograph confirms that all four are still there. Four large trees in a central square are unlikely to have gone quietly, but the last written confirmation is twenty years old, and anyone standing in the square can settle it faster than any archive.