The Magenta Cherry at the Forest Nursery

At the entrance to Bucaco's own tree nursery stands a magenta cherry, an Australian rainforest species usually kept as a hedge or a garden specimen rather than left to become a trunk 3.15 metres round. The register measured that girth and a crown almost as wide, 9.4 metres, in 2016, and recorded neither a height nor an age for it, which for Syzygium paniculatum is nearly as unusual as the size itself. Wild magenta cherry fruits a small sharp berry that gives the species its name, eaten straight off the branch or turned into jam in its native range, and it rarely grows this thick there. Two centuries of care for imported trees on this hillside, and a spot right beside the nursery that has propagated Bucaco's collection since the monks first planted it, seem to be what let this one keep going past the size most of its kind ever reach. It is a plainer address than the shrines and squares nearby, a working entrance rather than a monument, which fits a tree that is really evidence the nursery's own methods work. Nobody has dated it and the register does not try. If you know how old it is, tell us.