Three of the four trees the Catalan government calls monumental in Barcelona are foreign rarities.
Narrow-Leaved Ash
Fraxinus angustifolia
Fraxinus angustifolia is the ash of southern Europe, a riverside species that follows watercourses through country too dry for its northern cousin, and for centuries it was pollarded for fodder and tool handles rather than left to grow free. We map 3 of them, in 3 cities.
That habit shapes the old ones differently. Girona's, at L'Aulet in Vidreres, carries a 5.90 metre trunk built from decades of repeated cutting, a short massive base under a crown that is all regrowth. Barcelona's grew the opposite way, straight up a Montjuic quarry pit whose damp, sheltered air let it reach 29 metres, the tallest of its species recorded anywhere in Catalonia. Leiden's was planted in a Dutch botanical garden around 1818 and grafted, the swelling from that graft still visible after two centuries. York's willow-leaved form is a Yorkshire champion at twenty-four metres.
Barcelona
Girona
A trunk 5.90 metres round is a great deal of ash.
Photo: Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament de Territori i Sostenibilitat (Attribution)
York
At twenty-four metres, the Willow-Leaved Ash is the tallest of six trees in York Museum Gardens officially recognised as Yorkshire county champions, the largest recorded example of its kind anywher...
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