Blue Atlas Cedar, Ainslie Avenue and Currong Street

A street tree on a Braddon road verge stands 29 metres tall, about the height of a nine-storey building. It is a blue atlas cedar at the corner of Ainslie Avenue and Currong Street, and the ACT Tree Register puts its trunk at 3.5 metres round. The territory added it to the register on 10 August 2010, for its natural and cultural heritage value. That entry is the only written account of this cedar we have found. What nobody has recorded is its age. There is no planting date in any source, and the street around it does not date the tree. If you know when this corner of Ainslie Avenue got its cedar, or have an old photograph of it, tell us. The blue in the name is literal. This is the glaucous form of the Atlas cedar from the mountains of North Africa, its needles a silvery blue-green rather than the darker green of the wild trees, which is what separates it from most conifers on a city street. It makes a short walk with its neighbours. About 40 metres along the avenue, in front of Gorman House, the register lists an Arizona cypress and two more Atlas cedars as a group, so one stop covers four registered trees. Civic is about a kilometre away, roughly twelve minutes on foot. The pin is the middle of the register's outline of the crown, so it lands close rather than on the trunk.