La Reina

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.