The Sequoia of the Andromeda Parterre

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.