The Champion Mountain Laurel at Incarnate Word

Texas mountain laurel is a shrub. This one is nearly ten metres tall, which is exactly why it holds the state champion title for the species: 9.8 metres of height and a crown just over ten metres across, on a plant most Texans know as a dense evergreen bush beside a car park. Its trunk is 152 centimetres round. San Antonio's own development services department names it as the state champion in its planning material, and the newspaper that had it surveyed agrees. In March it flowers in heavy drooping purple clusters that smell of grape soda, unmistakably and from some distance, which is the one week of the year you can find this tree by nose. Afterwards it sets hard red seeds inside woody pods, the mescal beans that give the species its other name and that are toxic enough to leave alone. It grows beside the Lourdes Grotto on the Incarnate Word grounds, a devotional site people have been walking up to for generations; the gate there is decorative rather than locked. Local tradition puts the tree at around a hundred years old, and the paper that reported that figure says plainly it is folklore rather than record, so take it as a story people tell. Nobody has established an age. Come on foot. Driving onto campus can mean a visitor parking pass; walking in does not.