The Tamarind Tree

The National Trust's own record puts this tamarind older than the garden around it: 'thought to predate the formation of the Botanic Gardens', which were declared in 1855, with an estimated age near 190 years. That would set its planting in the mid-1830s, two decades before Walter Hill ever picked up a spade here. It rests on one source and reads better as an estimate than as a settled fact. What is not in doubt is that it is a real, fruiting tamarind. A Rare Fruit Council Australia trip report from May 1994 describes visiting it two years earlier: 'a large multi-stemmed tamarind, about forty foot tall with a forty six foot spread', starting to fruit for the season. The National Trust's current entry gives it 18 metres and makes no mention of multiple stems, a gap of three decades and one that measurement alone does not resolve; the two accounts may describe the same tree at different points in its growth, or there may be more to the difference than growth explains. It stands in the older, southern reach of the gardens, on the path toward Old Government House, still producing the sour brown pods that turn up in curries and chutneys across a tropics it was never native to. Whatever its real age, it is fruiting now, which most of Brisbane's founding-era trees no longer bother to do.