The Banyan Tree of City Botanic Gardens

Forty-nine metres around. That is the National Trust's figure for this banyan's trunk, and it is only possible because a banyan refuses to keep to one. The tree drops aerial roots from its limbs, they thicken into props where they land, and the props fuse back into the mass. Measure the result and you are measuring something that has been walking outward since the 1870s. It went in during Walter Hill's curatorship and now stands 29 metres tall with a crown 20 metres across. The National Trust record calls it the best known example of its species in Australia and gives it the finest aerial root structure in these gardens. The State Library of Queensland's account arrives at the same 49 metre circumference independently, which is worth knowing about a number that reads like a typing error. Ficus benghalensis is the fig of Indian village squares, the species whose old specimens end up roofing markets and meetings rather than merely shading them. Brisbane's subtropics suit it well enough that this one has behaved exactly as it would at home. Stand under it and the height is not the interesting part. The floor is: root, prop and trunk have become genuinely hard to tell apart, which is the whole point the measurement is trying to make.