The enigma of the Alhambra sequoia: the tree that was planted in Granada years before botanists discovered them

In 1926, back at his home in Seville after a trip to Granada, Harriet N. Dimond wrote a letter to a well-known Californian botanist, Willis L. Jepson, who at that time was already a professor at Berkeley. In it, Dimond described a “century-old cedar” (as the guide called it) that was “about 38 meters high, perhaps four in diameter, and already towering above the others on the hillside.” In addition, he sent her a sheet.

Jepson quickly realized that it was not a cedar. The leaves were Sequoia sempervirens, the enormous redwood of California. However, that was not even unusual: by 1926 coast redwoods were almost documented in Anglo-Saxon botanical literature and there were many European gardens full of them.

The enigma of size

In his letter, Dimond explained that, according to the guide, The trees had been planted by the Duke of Wellington. Among many other things, Wellington is remembered as the English commander who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo; but before that he had a prominent role in the War of Independence and, in gratitude, the Cortes of Cádiz gave him a huge estate in the heart of the Granada plain known as “the Soto de Roma”.

Since then the 1st Duke, his descendants and the rest of the British nobility They have had a fairly close relationship with the city of Granada. The popular story about the origin of trees was, at best, plausible. In fact, although neither Dimond nor Jepson knew it, in the north of the province there were another sequoia plantation whose origin has also been linked to Wellington.

The problem is that due to the size and thickness of the tree that Dimond saw, the dates did not add up. According to Jepson’s calculations, The Alhambra tree must have been 120 years old. That was not only prior to the first time Wellington set foot on the peninsula, but it was contemporary with the ‘Vancouver Expedition‘ in which Archibal Menzies had collected the first specimens of the species. What was a sequoia doing in the Alhambra at the end of the 18th century?

What is a tree like you doing in a place like this?

It took Jepson three years to find a reasonable explanation. Menzies had not been the first in collecting (botanically speaking) samples, seeds and leaves of the redwood. The first, logically, should have been Thaddaeus Haenkethe ‘chief’ botanist of the Malaspina expedition who, between 1789 and 1794, made a “scientific journey […] around the entire Empire.”

And I say “logically”, because the expedition reached the Californian Monterey Bay in 1791 and Haenke collected material in September, during the dry season. The perfect time to capture the enormous redwoods that were in the area at the perfect time.

The problem is that when Jepson reviewed Haenke’s “Californian material” that CB Presl had published many years later, couldn’t find any reference to redwoods under any known name nor, in fact, could he identify any conifer that matched the type of tree he was looking for. In other words, it was a brilliant hypothesis, but a hypothesis without proof after all.

That’s why, when years after Dimond’s letterJepson visited Kew Gardens in England (one of the leading botanical centers in the world), he did not hesitate to review the Epimeliae Botanicae from Prels himself. The most complete list of all the things that Haenke had collected throughout the trip. There, on page 237 of the book, Did you find what you were searching forIndeed, Haenke had collected redwood seeds and other samples from the trees for future research.

The Spanish connection

For Jepson, this not only confirmed his theory about the ‘botanical discovery’ of redwoods, but also explained the mysterious tree of the Alhambra. After all, as Jepson himself recognized in his 1929 article, “some naval officers, as is well known, also collected their own seeds from native trees.” All that was needed was for some member of the Malaspina would have ended up a few years later in the city of Granada.

In recent years we have learned that, in fact, the Spanish had had some previous opportunities to collect seeds and take them back to the peninsula.

As Antonio Madridejos tells itin 1768, “Charles III ordered José de Gálvez, his viceroy in Mexico City, to organize four expeditions – two by land and two by sea – to consolidate the Spanish presence in Alta California and thus prevent the landing of English and Russian settlers.

On one of those trips, commanded by Gaspar de Portolá, the expedition members camped near the current location of the city of Watsonville and visited Lake Pinto. There, in the entry for October 10, Juan Crespí wrote that they had been found with “great abundance” of “some very tall sticks of red woodunknown trees that have leaves very different from those of cedars.” Curiously, that seems to be the origin of Palo Alto; which was what the expeditioners called the next camp, already in San Francisco Bay.

So is there a sequoia in the Alhambra?

With all this in mind and, although it may seem surprising, the relevant question is not whether there is a sequoia in the Alhambra. There are sequoias in the monumental complex of the Alhambra, both in the Generalife and in other areas of the city. The problem is that, according to the monument’s Board of Trusteesthese sequoias were planted between 1854 and 1856, coinciding with the construction of the Generalife High Gardens (which, at that time, belonged to a private individual).

However, these They couldn’t have been the redwoods Dimond was talking about because they couldn’t have been that size when he saw it. That is why the relevant question is whether that sequoia existed in 1926 and there the situation becomes complicated.

In 2002, Donald C. Cutter, professor emeritus of history at the University of New Mexico, published a note in Botanical Electronic News in which he said that the specimen had died in “fairly recent times.” However, after searching the archives of local newspapers and viewing some old photos of the nasrid monumentI have not found much information about the supposed death of such a majestic tree.

Yes there is, for example, about the ‘Sultana cypress‘an enormous tree that is already shown in engravings from the year 1500, could be seen in 1926 and that, as reported in the press, died not long before Cutter’s note. Of the great sequoia, for now, there is no more trace than the bouquet of leaves that he sent to Jepson.

What exactly did Dimond see on his trip to Granada? Where is it or what happened to the mysterious sequoia of the Alhambra in Granada?

Image | Dave Herring | William Justen de Vasconcelos

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