The Macadamia Nut Tree

Nobody farmed macadamias until someone in Brisbane planted this tree. Walter Hill, first curator of the City Botanic Gardens, began trialling the nut here in 1858 from seed brought down from Gympie, and the tree those trials produced is still standing at the southern end of the rainforest section: 17 metres tall, a metre through the trunk. The National Trust's significant tree database and the State Library of Queensland both record it as the first macadamia brought into cultivation anywhere. Popular accounts go further and call it the oldest cultivated macadamia alive and the starting point of Australia's macadamia export industry, which is now a crop grown commercially across four continents. Those accounts are not what the entry rests on, but they do not contradict it either. The scale is the thing worth carrying home. Every macadamia in every jar of mixed nuts descends from a wild rainforest species that no one had thought to plant deliberately until a colonial gardener put some seed in the ground here and waited. The founding specimen of a global crop is usually long gone, ploughed out when an orchard was replanted or a road went through. This one ended up inside a public park in the middle of a state capital, unfenced, with a path running past it.