Calle de Jaramagos

The jaramago is one of those weeds nobody plants and that turn up anyway: branching stem, wrinkled leaves, spikes of yellow flowers that appear among the rubble of empty lots and at the foot of walls. The word came into Spanish from the Arabic sarmaq and, over the centuries, came to name several wild plants with yellow flowers and little value at the table. The name fits the old landscape of Tetuán. Valdeacederas and the neighboring districts grew up on the edge of Madrid, on rural ground where the jaramago was common. Most of these plant-named streets —⁠Margaritas, Cantueso, Miosotis⁠— entered the map in the mid-twentieth century, when the city absorbed the outlying villages and a batch of flowers and herbs cleared the tangle of repeated names. The plant still slips through the cracks in the asphalt every spring, though no one sows it.