During my recent visit to Andalusia, I noticed that in Seville, as in Granada and Cordoba, the most commonly planted street trees appeared to be citruses. It was a novelty to find these glossy leaved, and sometimes surprisingly thorny trees growing in the city’s thoroughfares and squares, because until this visit my only experience of the Seville orange was of the annual pilgrimage to the supermarket in mid January to secure a couple of kilos for marmalade making. This species of orange, Citrus aurantium, is favoured for preserve making because of its bitter peel and because its high  pectin content helps it to set.

This year I bought double the usual quantity of fruit and enjoyed a companionable day with a friend de-pithing and de-pipping, slicing and simmering. With the aid of two preserving pans we filled approximately 30 1lb jars with the sharply sweet preserve. After giving some jars as gifts, I estimate this will last until the autumn when I fill the gap until next January by making three fruit marmalade with sweet oranges, grapefruit and lemon. Whilst in Spain I learnt that the Spanish word for any  kind of jam or marmalade is ‘mermelada’ from which I understand our ‘marmalade’ derives, via the Portuguese word for quince, ‘marmelo’, which were originally boiled with sugar before the same technique was used with oranges.

Seville orange marmalade

1.5kg Seville oranges

2 lemons

2kg granulated sugar

1 muslin bag

8 sterilised jam jars

1. Halve and juice the oranges, then scrape out the pith and pips into the muslin bag or onto a square of muslin which tie into a bag.
2. Shred the rind thinly or thickly according to taste and add to the preserving pan with the orange juice, 2.5L of water and the muslin bag, immersed in the liquid and ties to the pan handle.
3. Simmer gently, uncovered, for 2 to 2.5 hours until the orange rind is soft. Meanwhile place some small plates in the fridge to chill.
4. Remove the muslin bag and squeeze as much of the juices into the pan as you can. Discard the bag.
5. Add 2 kg of sugar and the juice of the lemons and stir over a low heat until dissolved. Turn up the heat and boil rapidly for 15 minutes.
6. After 15 minutes, spoon a little marmalade onto a cold plate. There is a ‘set’ if the marmalade has a crinkly skin when pushed with  a finger. If it’s still runny, cook for another 5 minutes and test again.
7. Remove the pan from the heat, skim any froth from the surface with a large spoon and leave for 15 minutes before filling the hot sterilised jars using a ladle with a lip.
8. Seal the jars with a disc of waxed paper the surface of the marmalade, a larger disc of cellophane secured with an elastic band and the jar lid. Finally, label the jars.

The other street trees which made a big impression on me in Seville were the Moreton Bay Figs or Australian Banyan, Ficus macrophylla, which in at least two squares we saw served as monumental anchor points at each corner. One such square was Plaza Cristo de Burgos where our Air BnB apartment was located: in a large two patio building behind an ancient facade. Fig trees similarly framed the corners of the Plaza de Museo, one side of which is occupied by Seville’s wonderful Museo de Bellas Artes, in a former convent building. We took a break from the beautiful paintings and sculpture at an open facaded ice cream shop on the opposite side of the square where, appropriately enough, I chose the delicious fig ice cream. Not that the small stumpy stalked fruit of the Moreton Bay Fig is appetising, being described as unpalatable and dry. The little fruits litter the ground and are presumably consumed by birds and other fauna.

The striking features of these trees, sheer girth and height aside, are the sinuous aerial roots which wind around the spreading buttress roots and are protected in ‘overcoats’ of hessian sackcloth.  Clothing the roots in this way may be less a protective measure and more a method of preventing the tree living up to its species characteristic as a ‘strangler fig’. The magnificent specimens in this square are already huge and by restricting the younger aerial roots in this way, the scale of the trees might be controlled somewhat since I read that the roots are invasive and can damage pipework and pavements.

The oval evergreen leaves reflect the species epithet ‘macrophylla‘ meaning large leaved and create a dense shade which was welcome even in the last week of March.

 

 

If the overriding fragrance in late March in the southern Spanish city of Granada is that of wisteria (four weeks ahead of Greater London!), that in Cordoba is of orange blossom. Orange trees, many bearing both blossom and fruit, line the squares and avenues of this elegant city. Those growing on Calle Claudio Marcelo, where our Air BnB apartment was located, were laden with waxy white flowers and were planted closely together to create a cooling, shady environment for the busy office workers who seemed to frequent this district, a ten minute walk from the famous Mezquita. A temperature on the day we arrived of 25 degrees helped to pump out the sweet scent onto the street, having the practical effect of masking the less than fragrant odours emanating from the large recycling bins opposite the door to the apartment building.

Previous readers of this blog may have noted the writer’s penchant for salmon-pink geraniums. Just a cursory exploration of the secluded patios and calles of Cordoba revealed dozens of terracotta pots attached to available vertical surfaces: white-washed walls, metalwork balcony railings and external staircases: almost all spilling over with geraniums ranging from pale pink to magenta, via salmon-pink and scarlet. Clearly little or no frost affects the colourful displays. In a few secluded patios, glimpsed through wrought iron grilles known as ‘cancelas’, orange Clivia Miniata is visible, its spectacular trumpet like flowers thrown into vivid relief against the strappy dark green leaves. To this Northern European visitor, used to seeing the ‘Bush lily’ in glasshouses or conservatories, this was a truly exotic sight: in March AND outside! I read recently on the Kew Gardens Facebook page that this South African species, also commonly known as the Natal lily, is threatened in the wild by over-harvesting for both horticultural and local medicinal uses. The latter includes the treatment of snake bites.

Citrus trees also feature in the courtyard gardens of the Palacio de Viana, a mansion dating from the sixteenth century in the district of Santa Marina in the north east of the city. Twelve patios and a central garden are embedded within the extensive buildings of the palace, each courtyard inspiration for a small formal city garden. There are central pools with fountains in most of the courtyards, each of which is named for a predominant feature (Courtyard of the Well, the Pool and the Chapel) or historic association: hence the Courtyards of the Cats and the Madama. The planting is distinctive in each patio with an emphasis on container planting in most of the smaller areas. The range of plants is very extensive. A corner in the reception courtyard features Monstera deliciosa, the Swiss cheese Plant, in terracotta pots. Assorted half pots filled with the Sprengeri asparagus fern, Asparagus sprengeri, decorate a nearby wall. Intricate patterns of pebble mosaic cover the patio floors around the central fountains and doors and shuttered windows painted a muted shade of turquoise open tantalisingly off each patio.

In the Courtyard of the Bars, intensely blue and purple Senecio cruentis (commonly called Cineraria) is displayed in a theatrical tableau against one of these doorways: another example of a plant which is more usually seen at home as an indoor or conservatory specimen. The formal structure of the large square garden is created with four quadrants each comprising four beds bordered with box hedging (not a hint of box blight to be seen), some of the top surfaces clipped into hemispheres. Here a Date palm, Phoenix dactylifera, towers over the citruses: lime, lemon, grapefruit and mandarin as well as sweet and bitter oranges.

Function also plays its part in this little corner of paradise, in the form of the Courtyard of the Gardeners, where the gardeners used to store their tools, and the Courtyard of the Pool with its glasshouse used for propagation and pool containing water from the well in the neighbouring Courtyard of the Well which is served by an underground stream and supplies enough water for all twelve courtyards.

The design principle of a house constructed around a central patio is evident in the site we visited in the countryside to the west of Cordoba, Madinat Al-Zahra, where archaeologists have uncovered and partially reconstructed an Arab city dating from the tenth century. Rooms in the houses in the upper part of the site are arranged around wide square patios. An introductory video in the visitor centre at the foot of the hillside upon which the ancient city is located, helped me to envisage how these homes would have looked. In the March 2019 edition of the RHS magazine, The Garden, an article about garden designer Tom Stuart-Smith’s ‘Le Jardin Secret’ in Marrakesh contained a useful summary of the elements which symbolise the Islamic vision of paradise: ‘fourfold layout, water (the essence of life), enclosure and shade, a private space and symbolic, indigenous planting’. Madinat Al-Zahra survived for barely 75 years before power struggles within the ruling caliph’s family brought about the destruction of the city. Six centuries after its demise, the builders of the Palacio de Viana used these elements in the design of the many courtyards of the palace.

Next time I visit Seville Cathedral and discover a link with a tree in the garden at Osterley.