The Olive of the Facultad de Medicina

Four metres ninety around at the ground and two metres fifty at chest height, on a tree only five metres tall. That is an olive doing what olives do: pouring everything into a fluted, folded, half-hollow base while the crown stays low enough to pick from a short ladder. It grows on the University of Zaragoza's San Francisco campus, behind the Facultad de Medicina and the Colegio Mayor Pedro Cerbuna, on ground the city's own ordinance lists as university property rather than municipal. Zaragoza's catalogue of singular trees rated its condition very good when it was surveyed in 2005, and that catalogue is the only source that describes it. Nobody has dated it, and with an olive nobody easily could. The heartwood rots out of the middle of an old olive and what survives is a ring of living wood that splits into separate strands, so there are no rings left to count and the tree can renew itself from the base more or less indefinitely. Estimates for olives of this shape run from two hundred years to well over a thousand, and a number picked out of that range would be a guess wearing a decimal point. What the girth does say is that the tree is almost certainly older than the campus around it. This edge of Zaragoza was farmland before the faculties arrived, and an olive that wide was somebody's crop long before it was a specimen.