The Hoop Pine

The hoops are real. Run your eye up the trunk and you find it ringed at intervals with raised bands, stacked like the hoops on a barrel, which is where the tree got its name. It stands on raised ground just inside the George Street fence, about halfway along, where the gardens meet the QUT campus. Thirty three metres tall, its trunk a metre through and a shade over three metres around, it carries the stiff dark prickly foliage that gives every araucaria its slightly prehistoric look. That look is not a trick of the light. This is an old lineage of conifer, and its close relatives are the monkey puzzle and the Norfolk Island pine. Araucaria cunninghamii takes its name from Allan Cunningham, the botanist who came up the Brisbane River in the 1820s while the place was still a penal settlement. The species went on to build the city he was looking at: hoop pine was the softwood Queensland's sawmills ran on for generations, and it remains the state's main plantation conifer. The National Trust of Australia's significant tree register put its age at roughly sixty years when it was measured in January 2014, an approximation rather than a planting date, which puts it somewhere in its seventies now. The Trust went back to the listing in February 2023. That register is the only source we could find naming this particular tree.