The Second Ficus of the Glorieta

The biggest trunk in the Glorieta measures 11.35 metres around, and it belongs to a tree that may have been planted by mistake. Valencia put four Australian figs into these two adjoining gardens in 1852, and the account told about them locally is that the saplings arrived mixed into a delivery of magnolias and went into the ground before anyone identified what they were. This is the largest of the three standing in the Glorieta, and the second largest of the four overall, after El Titan across the road in the Parterre. Its crown is the widest in this garden, 39.5 metres of canopy over a tree 27.5 metres high, which in practice means a ceiling of leathery evergreen leaves that stays dark at midday in August. Ficus macrophylla comes from the coastal forests of New South Wales and Queensland and drops aerial roots that fuse and thicken into buttresses, which is how a trunk figure like 11.35 metres gets assembled in under two centuries. The 1852 date is documented for the group of four rather than for this tree individually, and other accounts hold that the four are not all the same age, so read roughly 170 years as the era and not the birthday. What is not in question is what it has stood through: the Civil War, and the 1957 Turia flood, which rose in the Glorieta far enough to threaten these crowns.