The Bodhi Tree

The record for this fig traces it, cutting by cutting, back to the tree the Buddha is said to have sat under. The line runs from Bodh Gaya in India to an ancient tree in Sri Lanka grown from it, and from there to this one, planted in the early 1880s. That is what the National Trust's entry states, and it is a claim that cannot be checked at either end. No second source adds anything independent to it: the audio guides and walking tours repeat the same paragraph. Treat the pedigree as tradition rather than as documented fact. The tree can be checked. Twenty five metres tall, three metres through the trunk, and one of the widest canopies in the gardens, which in a garden this full of figs is a real distinction. Its leaves are heart shaped with a drawn out tip and they move in air still enough to leave everything around them alone. One piece of the story is documented and it runs the other way. In 1983 the fourteenth Dalai Lama blessed this tree, during the same visit on which he attended the planting of a cutting taken from it at the University of Queensland. Whatever the ancestry behind it, there is a verified descendant of it growing across the city.