The Weeping Figs at Alice Street Gate

Walter Hill delivered his verdict on these two trees in 1872, and it is not a boast. The figs, he wrote, 'tended greatly to diminish the appearance of bareness'. They are 40 metres tall now, two metres through, standing either side of the Alice Street gate, and bareness is no longer the difficulty. Weeping figs are the species sold by the thousand as pot plants for office lobbies. Given open ground, subtropical rain and roughly a century and a half, this is what they do instead: a matched pair holding up the main entrance the way a gatehouse would, which is how the National Trust describes them, as a landmark denoting the way in. The dating is not clean, and the framing is not either. The National Trust puts the planting at 1868 and treats these two as a deliberate pair marking the entrance. Wikipedia's account of the gardens describes an avenue of weeping figs planted in the 1870s and does not single them out. Species and rough decade are agreed between the two; whether this pair was planted as a pair, or is what remains of a longer line, rests on the Trust's record alone, as does the earlier date. Either way they are the first thing the gardens show you, and the last thing you walk through on the way back out to Alice Street.