The Pohutukawa of Monserrate

New Zealand's Christmas tree blooms scarlet in Portugal in early summer instead, six months off its native schedule and a hemisphere away from the only place it grows wild. This Metrosideros excelsa, a pohutukawa, is one of a pair planted in the grounds Francis Cook built around Monserrate Palace in the second half of the 19th century, though no record pins the planting to a specific year; estimates for this specimen, known locally only as New Zealand Two, range across a full century, sometime between 1750 and 1850, wide enough that even Monserrate's own material describes it simply as older than Cook's own tenure rather than assigning it a date. What is measured rather than estimated is its girth, just over 9 metres around a trunk that has grown the tangled aerial roots the species uses in the wild to grip volcanic coastal cliffs, here gripping nothing but Portuguese hillside soil a mountain away from any coastline. In New Zealand the tree is a national symbol, its flowering timed so precisely to the southern hemisphere summer that it marks the calendar the way certain trees elsewhere mark autumn. Cook's Monserrate collects that kind of geographic joke throughout its grounds, a garden built to prove a 19th century Englishman could grow almost anything on a hillside above Lisbon, if he imported the whole world to do it.