The Old Government House Fig

Moreton Bay figs do not so much grow as advance. This one holds a 23 metre crown on buttress roots that leave the trunk above knee height and run into the ground like low walls, with two metres of trunk standing behind them. It sits on the path to Old Government House, the oldest public building in Queensland and now part of a university campus, so the tree is what you look at while walking between two versions of the same city. The record comes from the National Trust of Australia's significant tree database, which dates the planting to somewhere between 1864 and 1884, during the curatorship of Walter Hill. Hill was appointed the gardens' first curator in 1855 and spent decades planting the ground out. A twenty year window is as precise as the paperwork gets, and nobody has narrowed it since. That one record is also the whole of the evidence. We have not found a second write-up dealing with this specimen rather than with the gardens' figs in general, so read the date and the age as the Trust's account rather than as a settled fact. The tree itself needs no defending. Good condition, no fence, no ticket, and buttresses you can put a flat hand against.