The Cedar of Lebanon at Andromeda

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.