The Holm Oak of Parque Bruil

This is the tree the neighbourhood meets at. In February 2012 a public gathering was called with the instruction to meet at the holm oak of Parque Bruil, and the reason was not affection but alarm: work remodelling the park had cut into its root plate and the tree had no protection plan of any kind. Holm oak is the native oak of this dry country, evergreen, small dark leaves furred pale underneath, and it was one of the species Juan Bruil's French gardeners put in when they laid out these grounds after 1842, alongside mulberries and plums and a great deal of imported novelty. The city measured it at two metres forty round at chest height and fourteen metres tall in 2004, which for a species that grows slowly on thin Aragonese soil is a considerable tree. What it has watched is a long argument about who the ground belongs to. It stood in a private garden that opened to the public one day a week, then in an estate the city spent years expropriating, and since 1965 in a public park that has been dug up and rebuilt around it more than once. It is still here.