The garden around this fig was taken by the people who live on the street.
Common Fig
Ficus carica
A common fig is a Mediterranean shrub that most gardens this far north keep low and trained flat against a warm wall. We map 3 of them, in 3 cities.
Three of these refused. Paris's, in the Square Georges Cain beside the Musee Carnavalet, stands ten metres tall in the open with a trunk 145 centimetres round, which a fig this far from the Mediterranean has no real business doing. London's Amwell Street fig went the other way, sprawling low across the front of a former parochial school in Clerkenwell on several stems from one rootstock, propped up where its own limbs outgrew their strength, and it may have been planted as a teaching aid rather than an ornament. Seville's is the oldest of the three at over 300 years, growing in the Huerto del Rey Moro, a walled plot on Calle Enladrillada that neighbours occupied in 2004 rather than watch it get built over, and have run themselves ever since. One species, three trees that each broke the pattern in a different way.
Seville
Paris
A fig has no business standing ten metres tall in the open in Paris.
London
This fig may have been planted as a teaching aid.
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