The Stone Pine of the Jardines de Cristina

Queen María Cristina had a garden opened in her name on 24 July 1830, and a local gardens association names this pine, in bed 15, as a tree of that founding period. That is a source pointing at this specimen rather than at the garden's date, which puts it somewhere around 180 to 210 years old. Nobody has counted its rings, so the band stays broad. It has grown into the size that goes with those years. Twenty five metres tall, a trunk 2.80 metres around at chest height and 3.11 at the base, with the flat umbrella crown of a stone pine spreading 12.5 metres over the path. The city's 2022 survey finds its physiology and plant health clean and its structure compromised, which is common in a tree carrying that much canopy on one long bare stem. The Jardines de Cristina are 8,100 square metres of public ground wedged between the Puerta de Jerez and the Guadalquivir, and this pine has stood through the whole of their public life, including the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition that rebuilt this end of Seville around it and the tram line that now runs past the gate. Stone pine has been grown around the Mediterranean for its edible seeds since Roman times. This one is a city tree, two minutes from a tram stop, and it is free to walk under at any hour.