The Bunya Pine by the Palace Hotel

Do not stand under this one in a bad year. The bunya pine makes the heaviest cone of any conifer on earth, up to ten kilograms, roughly a bowling ball, and it drops them from a crown twenty-eight metres up. In its native southeast Queensland the trees fruit heavily every three years or so, and Aboriginal groups travelled hundreds of kilometres for the bunya gatherings that followed, feasting on the nuts inside. Australia now signs and fences these trees in public parks for the obvious reason. This one is five metres round the trunk and has been growing beside the Palace Hotel for about a century and a half, which means it went in while the hotel was still a Carmelite convent and was already substantial when the neo-Manueline palace rose next to it between 1888 and 1905. Araucarias are living fossils, a family that was spread across the southern supercontinent before the continents separated, and the stiff geometric spirals of their leaves look older than everything around them because they are. It is the strangest silhouette in a forest full of imports.