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The Crow's Ash of Newstead Park

Approximate location.

The house went up in 1846, and this tree was probably already standing. That is the entire basis for its age: Gardening Australia looked at the crows ash in the grounds of Newstead Park, judged that it predated the building, and put it at over 160 years. Nobody taped the trunk and nobody counted a ring, so read that number as a floor rather than a measurement. Crows ash is a rainforest hardwood from the Queensland coast, milled and sold as Australian teak, hard enough that it went into floorboards and railway carriages. The detail worth looking down for is the seed capsule: woody, covered in short blunt spines, splitting into five boat-shaped parts that end up scattered on the grass under the crown. It shares the park with the tree everybody comes for, the hollowed Cunningham's fig on the entrance roundabout with a loudspeaker in the garden bed beside it, about 160 metres away. This one has no speaker and no plaque, which is why it takes more looking for. Two honesty notes. A single organisation carries this tree, an ABC gardening segment and its companion factsheet, and nothing else we searched names it, so both the age and the identification rest on that one account. And the pin marks the house rather than the trunk, because the source places the tree in the grounds without saying where in them. If you can put us on the exact spot, tell us.

Newstead Park, near Newstead House, 191A Breakfast Creek Road, Newstead QLD 4006You can recognise it by the seed capsules on the grass beneath it, woody and blunt-spined, splitting into five boat-shaped parts. It stands in the open grounds about 160 metres from the fig, with no plaque and no speaker.

Free. Stands in the open grounds of Newstead Park, a public Brisbane City Council park with no gate or fee.

Breakfast Creek Rd at Evelyn St bus stop (routes 227, 300), about 2 minutes' walk. Bowen Hills rail station about 9 minutes' walk.

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