The Silky Oaks of Largo Marques de Pombal

For eleven months of the year this is a tall Australian tree that most people walk past. For a few weeks in spring it covers itself in orange, in dense one-sided combs of flower that look more like a bottlebrush than anything a European tree does, and the whole square changes colour. The parish, which knows its own trees, describes them as rare in Portugal, and there are two of them here, standing metres apart on what used to be the Praca de Sao Pedro. Silky oak is not an oak at all. It belongs to the protea family, its nearest relatives are the banksias and grevilleas of Australia, and it was carried around the world in the nineteenth century for exactly the display it puts on here. In its native Queensland it grows to forty metres in rainforest; on a Portuguese square it settles for nineteen. The two trees are near twins and the register separates them only by trunk girth, so stand between them and you are looking at both.