The Centennial Hackberries of María Luisa

Not every tree on this list needed royal patronage or a foreign pedigree to earn its place. The Mediterranean hackberries scattered through Parque de María Luisa, clustered most densely near the Glorieta Rafael de León, the Choza de los Carneros and the Paseo de los Rosales, are a native Iberian species that grew in this soil for generations before any garden was landscaped around it. Several specimens here are recognized as centennial by the city's own singular-trees inventory, prized less for any single record than for the deep, textured shade their slow canopies provide across the park's oldest paths. The species is tough and long-lived, tolerant of drought, poor soil and hard pruning, which is exactly why Seville's gardeners let so many of them stand while faster, showier imports like the park's Australian figs and eucalyptus got the attention. Parque de María Luisa itself was the private garden of the Palacio de San Telmo before Princess María Luisa Fernanda donated part of it to the city in 1893, decades before landscape architect Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier redesigned it for the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition. These hackberries predate that transformation. They were already old when the glorietas, fountains and pavilions went up around them, quiet holdovers from what the land looked like before it became a park at all.