Spain's tallest trees are not in a forest. They are in a French garden 11 kilometres from Segovia, planted for a king who wanted Versailles and got something better suited to the mountain behind it. The gardens at La Granja were laid out in the 1720s and stocked through the nineteenth century with conifers from North America and the Atlas, and five now clear 32 metres, led by a giant sequoia called La Reina. In Segovia itself, one Atlas cedar in a square below the cathedral is on the same register.
0 of 6 visited in Segovia
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The Cedar of the Plaza de la Merced
Atlas Cedar (Cedrus atlantica) · Casco antiguo
Segovia's one registered notable tree inside the walls is a North African cedar in a small square. The Plaza de la Merced sits just below the cathedral in the old town, and the Atlas cedar in it runs to 25.5 metres, which is high enough to read against the stone from a street away. Cedrus atlantica comes from the mountains of Morocco and Algeria and was planted across Europe from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, so it is almost certainly a garden tree of that generation rather than anything older, but Castilla y Leon's register carries no age column and no age has been published, so this page will not guess at one. The register does carry a trunk figure and the page will not print that either, for a reason worth stating: the column is labelled diameter, and read as diameter it makes the largest sequoia at La Granja thicker than any sequoia in Europe, which nothing supports. A number that fails on one tree cannot be trusted on another. The cedar was entered on the regional register under a 2006 order and nothing has been added since. If you know when it was planted, tell us.
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2
La Reina
Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) · La Granja de San Ildefonso
Lightning hit it in 1991 and it is still here and still growing. La Reina is a giant sequoia in the gardens of the royal palace at La Granja, and the numbers show the growth plainly: the regional register measured it at 42.5 metres in 2006 and Patrimonio Nacional now gives it 46, which is what a healthy sequoia does with twenty years. It carries a lightning conductor now. It stands with a companion, El Rey, in front of the palace collegiate church, and both are over 40 metres, which puts them among the tallest trees in Spain. There is nothing native about either. Sequoiadendron giganteum reached Europe in 1853 as seed out of California, and within a decade every estate that could afford one had ordered it, so almost all of Europe's tallest trees are the same generation of planted specimens standing in gardens. The garden they stand in was begun in the 1720s for Philip V, who wanted a Versailles in the Guadarrama foothills and got a French formal layout with a mountain behind it, and its conifers went in through the nineteenth century. Nobody publishes an age for this tree.
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3
The Sequoia of the Andromeda Parterre
Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) · La Granja de San Ildefonso
The second-tallest sequoia in these gardens stands over a fountain about Perseus killing a sea monster. The Andromeda parterre is one of the set pieces of La Granja, a lead and marble group at the bottom of a slope, and the garden's designers filled the compartments around it with planting that has since gone well past what an eighteenth century French parterre was ever meant to hold. This sequoia is 37.5 metres by the regional register, and a cedar of Lebanon in the same parterre reaches 32.5. The effect is a formal garden with a redwood in it, which is not what Philip V's gardeners drew and is the more interesting thing to stand in. La Granja's fountains run on gravity alone, fed from a reservoir up the hill, with no pumps anywhere in the system and no pumps since 1720; they operate on set days and it is worth checking before travelling. As with every tree on this page, no age is published: Castilla y Leon's register has no age column, and the garden's conifers are a nineteenth century collection rather than anything from the original layout.
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4
The Douglas Fir of the Dragon Fountain
Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) · La Granja de San Ildefonso
A tree from the Pacific northwest, at 36.5 metres, over a fountain of dragons. Douglas fir arrived in Britain in 1827 in a consignment of seed sent home by David Douglas, who had spent years walking the Columbia river country collecting, and it spread through European estates as the fastest-growing conifer anybody had tried. In its own range it is the second tallest tree on earth after the coast redwood. Here it is the tallest thing on this page that is not a sequoia, and it stands beside the Fuente de los Dragones in a garden built two centuries before anyone in Spain had heard of it. The register records it as the Pseudotsuga del Dragon and gives no age. That gap is the whole shape of this page: Castilla y Leon listed these trees in 2006 for size and species and never asked how old they were, and nobody has asked since. Given that the garden's conifer collection went in through the nineteenth century, a Douglas fir here would be somewhere between 150 and 180 years old, which is young for a tree and about as old as the species gets outside America.
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5
The Spanish Fir of the Potosi Parterre
Spanish Fir (Abies pinsapo) · La Granja de San Ildefonso
This is the only Spanish tree in the collection, and it comes from 700 kilometres south. Abies pinsapo grows wild in three small patches of the mountains behind Ronda and Grazalema and nowhere else in Europe, a fir left behind when the ice retreated and the climate around it dried out, and it was not described by botanists until the 1830s. Within a few decades it was in gardens across the continent, including this one, where it now stands 32 metres high in the Potosi parterre. It is a strange-looking tree close up. The needles come off the shoot in every direction at once rather than combing to the sides like most firs, so the branches look bottle-brushed, and the cones stand upright on the upper limbs and disintegrate on the tree instead of dropping whole. That there is one here at all is the point: La Granja's planting is a nineteenth century catalogue of everything a gardener could get hold of, and the pinsapo was as exotic to a Segovian gardener in 1860 as a sequoia was. No age is published.
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6
The Cedar of Lebanon at Andromeda
Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) · La Granja de San Ildefonso
The cedar of Lebanon is the oldest fashion in this garden. It reached western Europe around 1640, two centuries before the sequoias and the Douglas firs that now stand near it, which makes it the one conifer here that Philip V's gardeners could in principle have known about when they began the layout in the 1720s. Whether this particular tree is that old is unknown and probably not: the register gives no age, and the garden's documented conifer planting belongs to the nineteenth century along with everything else on this page. It is 32.5 metres tall, in the Andromeda parterre with the sequoia. A cedar of Lebanon that gets left alone develops the flat tiered top that everyone recognises from paintings, the branches going out horizontally in layers, and it takes the better part of a century to start doing it. This one has. The species is down to remnant stands in the mountains of Lebanon and Turkey after three thousand years of being cut for ships and temples, which is a reason to look at a healthy one in a Spanish garden with some attention.
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