The White Rabbit Tree of Newstead Park

This tree has a door in its trunk and a painted White Rabbit at the foot of it. Fungal disease rotted the crepe myrtle out from the inside, the hollow was packed with concrete and finished with a small hinged door, and the playground built around it at Newstead Park took its Alice in Wonderland theme from a tree that was already there. Gardening Australia calls it the largest tree of its kind in the southern hemisphere. That is their claim and we have found nobody who has checked it, but the size is real enough that the claim is worth repeating with its source attached. The same segment says it was planted at about the time Newstead House was built, which was 1846, putting it around 180 years old. That is a planting claim made about this specimen rather than a date lifted off the building. Lagerstroemia speciosa is the outsized member of a genus otherwise grown for suburban front gardens. Through the Brisbane summer it carries dense panicles of crinkled mauve and pink, then colours and drops its leaves before flushing again. A tree filled with concrete, wearing a rabbit and flowering anyway is a good reason to walk into a playground as an adult. One organisation carries all of this, an ABC gardening segment and its factsheet, and no second source we searched names the tree at all. If you have stood in front of it recently, tell us how it is looking.