Bruce Remnant Red Gum

This red gum is far wider than it is tall. It stands 15 metres high, but its crown spreads 25.4 metres, and it does it on four trunks whose girths, measured together by the ACT Tree Register, come to 10.28 metres. It is a remnant, the register's word for a tree that was growing here before the suburb was. Bruce was laid out around it, and today it holds the east corner of a small park at Kinloch Circuit and Lycos Street as if somebody had planted it there for the purpose. Nobody did. The houses came to the tree. The register lists it for its age, its stature and its prominent position, and for the company it keeps: nest-building birds, and parrots in a number of hollows. Its assessors noted the very large spreading canopy and the many-branched habit of the trunk, and wrote that Bruce has several parks with remnant trees but that this small one is particularly attractive because of this one. In 2015 the ABC, writing about Canberra's exceptional trees, pictured a remnant Blakely's red gum with parrots in its hollows and called it hundreds of years old. The caption did not name the suburb, so we cannot be sure it meant this tree, and no other source gives an age. If you know one, tell us.