Calle de la Saxífraga

Saxifrage is a small plant that clings to cracks in the rock and blooms where almost nothing takes root. Its name, from the Latin saxum, stone, and frangere, to break, means literally “stone-breaker”. Pliny said it dissolved bladder stones, and to that use, rather than to its habit of growing among rocks, he traced the name. Which of the two readings weighed at its naming remains unsettled. Calle de la Saxífraga is a short street in the Nueva España neighbourhood, in Chamartín, developed with low-house colonies from the 1920s. Several nearby streets bear the names of trees, flowers and plants, and saxifrage joined that street herbarium.