The Spanish Fir of the Potosi Parterre

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.