A residents' association liked this tree enough to put it on their letterhead.
Indian Laurel Fig
Ficus microcarpa
Hong Kong keeps a category of tree that almost nowhere else bothers with. We map 17 of them, in 8 cities.
A stone wall tree grows straight out of a masonry retaining wall, roots threaded down through the joints, and the department responsible for several of them is not the one that runs the parks but the one that looks after government masonry. Twenty-seven of them line three walls on Forbes Street, and when engineers planned to extend the MTR through Kennedy Town the station was rerouted rather than the wall removed. The species is common enough that the city plants it by the thousand and almost never lets one grow old. The exception is the King Banyan in Kowloon Park, put at four hundred years and still the largest urban tree in the city after a 2007 typhoon took a third of its trunk. In Okinawa, a whole village carried one banyan to where it stands now.
Seville
This fig grows two trunks from one root system, 2.10 and 1.97 metres round, and Seville's 2022 survey rated its condition optimal on every measure it took: physiology, structure and plant health al...
Alicante
A fig here has a crown 27 metres across, wide enough that its neighbour, growing nineteen metres away, is usually mistaken for the same tree.
Plaza de Navarro Rodrigo is one of Benalúa's oldest squares, laid out on land the Marqués de Benalúa donated to the city and named for the nineteenth-century politician and writer who represented A...
This ficus is one of thirteen Ficus microcarpa the city catalogues as monumental, named in a 2025 council press release that also describes the maintenance regime behind the health of these trees:...
Malaga
Malaga's central promenade has had three different trees in its 240-year history, and the ones standing today were themselves meant to be temporary.
Photo: rosemarydukelow (CC BY 2.0)
Hong Kong
A third of this banyan's trunk came down in a 2007 typhoon, and what remains is still recognised as Hong Kong's largest urban tree by trunk girth, a title the government's own tree register gave it...
Nobody agrees on what this stone house was originally for, a temple, a study hall, a family residence, but everybody agrees on why it stands empty: in 1661, the new Qing dynasty ordered Hong Kong's...
Photo: Fran1001hk (CC BY-SA 4.0)
When engineers first drew up plans to extend the MTR through Kennedy Town, a wall of nearly thirty banyan trees stood directly in the way, and after a 2005 flash-mob campaign by the Conservancy Ass...
Photo: Forz (CC BY 3.0)
Hong Kong's government files this tree under two categories at once, and the second is the interesting half.
This park opened in June 1941 and was a rubbish dump by Christmas.
The government's inspection of this tree reads like a description of the street it is on.
Mexico City
A property developer wanted this tree gone, and the street would not have it.
Okinawa
The whole village turned out to carry this tree to where it now stands.
They moved the road rather than cut this one down.
Kauai
The road this tree was planted beside no longer exists.
Maui
Wailuku's police station moved out and left the fig.
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