This garden is named after a defeat.
Tipu Tree
None of the Lisbon tipus stands anywhere a gardener would have chosen. This page maps every tipu tree on the site, 6 so far across 3 cities.
One holds down a traffic circle, where a crown 34 metres across had become the city's problem by 2018. One stands in the middle of a bus terminal. One occupies the triangle of grass outside parliament, which has kept a South American tree on its doorstep for about ninety years. The fourth grows in the garden named for the Portuguese defeat at La Lys in 1918. Tipuana tipu comes from the foothills of Bolivia and Argentina, a legume with feathery leaves and single winged pods that spin down like sycamore keys, and it puts up with pavement, drought and hard pruning better than most things. The Barcelona tree, about 101 years old, is the specimen the city measures its other tipus against, and there are plenty to measure: it is one of the commonest street trees in the city.
Lisbon
Photo: Yair Haklai (CC BY-SA 4.0)
This tree stands in the middle of a bus terminal, and that is the honest story rather than something to smooth over.
A tree with a thirty four metre crown grows in the middle of a traffic circle, and by 2018 that crown had become the problem.
Portugal's parliament keeps a South American tree on its doorstep.
Barcelona
The tipu tree is one of the commonest trees on Barcelona's streets, and this is the one the city measures the others against.
Seville
At 32 metres this tipu tree is taller than almost anything else planted for its flowers in Seville, a South American species from Bolivia and Argentina that has become one of the most widely plante...
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