The Monte Cecilia Fig

The largest Moreton Bay fig in New Zealand throws a crown wider than it is tall, by twenty metres. The register measures the spread at 51.7 metres on average, readings of 55.4 by 48, over a tree 30 metres high. Its girth is recorded as 1594 centimetres, taken at the narrowest waist of the bole, and that figure needs reading carefully: this is a three-trunked tree, so the tape goes around several merged stems rather than one clean column. It was planted around 1850, which makes it roughly 176 years old, in a band of 170 to 180. The ground it stands on was then Pah Farm, the estate of James Williamson, known around Auckland as Williamson's Castle, and the designed landscape around it was laid out under head gardener John Blackmoore. For the next century and a half the fig grew behind a private boundary. Auckland Council bought the estate in 2004, so a tree that has stood here since the 1850s has only been open to everybody for its last twenty years. It is not alone. Monte Cecilia Park holds several old Moreton Bay figs, and the council's own account calls many of them the oldest of their species in the country. One caveat on the numbers. A second source puts the height nearer 27 metres against the register's 30, and nobody has been up with a rangefinder to settle it.