The Judas Tree of the Real Alcázar

A Judas tree that has reached sixteen metres has done something the species does not normally bother with. Cercis siliquastrum is a small tree, usually topping out around eight or ten metres in a courtyard, and this one in the Alcázar's English Garden is twice the height of the ones people plant on purpose, with a trunk 2.20 metres round and a crown twelve metres across. Its trick is the flowering. In March, before a single leaf shows, magenta pea flowers open straight out of the bark, on the old wood and the bare limbs as well as the twigs, so the whole frame of the tree turns pink for a fortnight. Botanists call it cauliflory, and almost nothing else in a European garden does it. The Spanish call the species the árbol del amor, the love tree. English took the other tradition, that Judas hanged himself from one. Same tree, worse story. The garden around it was planted from 1910, when the Alcázar laid out a cooler, shadier English counterpoint to its Andalusi courtyards. Nothing dates this particular tree. What the city's surveyors did record, when they measured it in July 2022, is a tree in optimal physiological condition with no plant health anomalies at all, which is not something they wrote about many of its neighbours.