Chinaberry

Cordoba grew one to twenty-four and a half metres beside the Puerta de Almodovar, casting four hundred square metres of shade from a species that usually stops at ten; its hard seed stones, strung as rosary beads, gave the tree its other name, bead tree. Nara planted its specimen on the burned platform of Todai-ji's east pagoda, because chinaberry was believed to drive off evil spirits and was traditionally set at sites where the dead were remembered; for two weeks each May it covers itself in pale purple flowers. Paris keeps one in Square Boucicaut, where the French call it lilas de Perse, Persian lilac, and where its pale yellow berries stay on the bare branches through December and January, a Mediterranean tree fruiting through a cold it was never bred for.