A mastic is supposed to stay a shrub.
Mastic Tree
Pistacia lentiscus spends most of its life as a shrub, a low, dense presence across Mediterranean scrubland that most walkers step past without a glance. This page maps every mastic tree on the site, 3 so far across 3 cities.
Left standing for long enough, on the right ground, it does something else: pushes up a real trunk and takes on the shape and size of a proper tree, which is exactly why the specimens mapped here were singled out. The species is best known commercially for mastic resin, tapped for millennia from trees on the Greek island of Chios and used in everything from chewing gum to varnish. One specimen here, in Istanbul, is put at roughly 500 years old, a genuine outlier for a plant almost nobody lets live that long. Three mapped, in Barcelona, Istanbul and Palma de Mallorca.
Barcelona
Palma de Mallorca
Pistacia lentiscus is a shrub almost everywhere it grows, a low, dense presence in Mediterranean scrubland that most walkers step past without a glance.
Istanbul
Most mastic trees stay shrub sized, a couple of metres of scrubby Mediterranean green grown for their resin, not their timber.
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