The Harbour Wall Fig

This fig does not grow in the ground. It grows out of the thirty-foot harbour wall just east of Bristol Bridge, a wall that was once part of Bristol Castle's defences, and how it got there, or when, the Bristol Tree Forum calls a mystery. The likeliest answer is an accident of trade. A Bristol river blogger who follows the figs along the Avon, the harbour and the Malago believes they were seeded by fruit from boats and by ballast. The same blogger traced a huge fig opposite the old brewery through historic photographs from 1905, the 1920s, 1930 and 1951, and thinks it the oldest of at least two figs in Castle Park. This one grows in that spot. Neither source says in so many words that it is the same plant, so its century and more rests on those photographs and its position. Every so often it is cut hard back to keep it clear of the river traffic. On 31 July 2018 a storm pulled half of it out of the wall, and the Harbour Master's team cleared the wreckage from the water. What grows there now is the regrowth, smaller than the mass in the old photographs, and still alive: people recorded it there in July and again in October 2026. It is a wall tree, so nobody has measured a trunk. If you know when it first appeared, tell us.