The Magnolia of the Real Alcázar

Four metres seventy round is a great deal of magnolia. This is a species most people meet as a well behaved garden tree with glossy leaves, and this one has a trunk six metres ten around at the base, tapering to 4.70 at chest height, carrying twenty metres of crown over the Baños de Doña María de Padilla, the vaulted rainwater tank beneath the Alcázar's Patio del Crucero. It is not a local. Magnolia grandiflora comes from the wet forests of the American southeast and arrived in European gardens in the eighteenth century as a slow, expensive novelty for people who could afford to wait. Seville turned out to suit it better than most places did. The city's 2022 survey of its singular trees records the tree's physiology as normal, its structure as normal and its overall condition as good, and then, in the box for biological agents, names Agrocybe aegerita, a wood decay fungus that fruits in tight clusters on living hardwoods. That is why its plant health reads as regular rather than clean. A tree this size carrying a decay fungus is neither unusual nor a death sentence, but it is the kind of thing a city writes down and comes back to. The flowers open in May and June, cream coloured and the size of a spread hand, and you smell them before you find them.