The Stone Pines of Rua Henri Perron

These two were here before the street was. The parish describes the stone pines on this road as survivors of the woodland that covered the ground before the city expanded northwards over it, which makes them older than the neighbourhood rather than planted into it, and it explains why they stand where they do rather than in any pattern. The larger has a trunk four and fifteen metres around, the thickest of any tree in central Setubal. Stone pine is the umbrella pine of every Portuguese and Italian horizon, the one with a bare trunk and a flat spreading head, and it is a working tree as much as an ornamental one: its cones hold pine nuts, which take three years to ripen and are still harvested commercially across this part of Portugal. The shape is not decorative either. A stone pine sheds its lower branches as it grows so that the crown sits above browsing height and above the reach of ground fire, which is a design for surviving exactly the landscape this city was built on.