The Crows Ash

The first recorded act of gardening on this ground was a felling. In 1826 an older crows ash was cut down here to mark the spot where the Moreton Bay penal settlement would put its government garden, and the ground has been a garden ever since. The tree standing there now is not that tree, and no record suggests any descent between them. It was planted in 1884, is 21 metres tall and a metre through the trunk, and belongs to a genus named for Matthew Flinders, who charted this coast three decades before the settlement that cleared its predecessor. Crows ash is a rainforest hardwood, sold as Australian teak, and its seed capsules are the detail worth looking down for: woody, covered in short spines, and splitting open into five parts like a carved wooden flower. They end up on the grass under the tree, which stands between the formal flower garden and the river. One caution about the dating. A single record carries this tree, the National Trust of Australia's significant tree database, and we found no second source naming this individual, although the gardens are separately documented as holding native Flindersia of the same era. So 1884 is the Trust's date rather than a corroborated one, and the age here is stated on one authority.