The Third Ficus of the Glorieta

The smallest of Valencia's four great figs still has a trunk two people cannot reach around. This is the third Ficus macrophylla of the Glorieta, 4.95 metres in girth and 18.1 metres tall, with a crown spreading 27.8 metres, half as wide again as the tree is high. In most cities that is the headline tree on the page. Here it is the modest member of a family that includes a specimen with a 13.8-metre trunk on the other side of the road. All four went in together in 1852, in the planting that gave the Parterre and the Glorieta their Australian figs. Why this one stayed smaller is not written down anywhere, and it is the sort of question somebody holding the garden's old plans could probably answer: root space, water, paving and where the drains run all differ across a garden barely a hundred metres across. That 1852 date belongs to the group. No source dates this tree on its own, and accounts that have looked at the four say they are not all of an age, so the honest figure here is an era rather than a number. It stands at the eastern end of the Glorieta, the furthest of the three from the Palace of Justice, and unlike the university's botanic garden across town it costs nothing to walk up to and stand under.