The Mahogany of Commerce

Nothing would grow under this tree, and that turned out to be useful. Walter Hill planted it in 1861, testing whether West Indian mahogany could take root as a colonial timber crop the way it had elsewhere in the empire. The tree took, growing into what the National Trust's significant tree database calls probably the first mahogany planted in Queensland and among the oldest of its species anywhere in Australia: 41 metres tall, its trunk two metres through. The bare ground under its canopy shaped part of the garden decades later. A later curator, Harry Oakman, turned the empty soil beneath and around the mahogany into what became the gardens' rainforest section, so a tree brought in to test a colonial industry ended up dictating the layout of an entirely different corner of the park. The timber trade Hill hoped for never really arrived. Mahogany stayed a curiosity in Australia rather than a crop, unlike the macadamia planted a few decades later just 35 metres away. The most recent recorded inspection, from February 2014, found the tree in good condition. What is left of the experiment is one very tall, two-metre-thick specimen and the ground it cleared for something else entirely.