A mastic is supposed to stay a shrub.
Mastic Tree
Pistacia lentiscus
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. We map 5 of them, in 5 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. The species is best known for mastic resin, tapped for millennia on the Greek island of Chios. The oldest here is U Listincu on the Gattone plain in eastern Corsica, reckoned at 700 to 1,000 years and rooted in the stonework of a Roman-era structure; it was France's Tree of the Year in 2011. Istanbul's Florya mastic is put at roughly 500 years. Catalonia protects a mastic at Torrent by law, and Barcelona and Palma each keep one that grew up instead of out.
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.
Girona
This is a shrub, and Catalonia has protected it by law.
Photo: Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament de Territori i Sostenibilitat (Attribution)
Istanbul
Most mastic trees stay shrub sized, a couple of metres of scrubby Mediterranean green grown for their resin, not their timber.
Ghisonaccia
Mastic is a shrub.
Photo: Terre Sauvage (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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