The Lone Pine, Australian War Memorial

The most famous pine in Australia was born from a soldier's pocket. In 1915 at Gallipoli, the ridge above a lone Aleppo pine gave its name to one of the bloodiest battles the Anzac forces fought, and the original tree did not survive it. Sergeant Benjamin Smith picked up two cones from the wreckage and carried them home. Nineteen years later, on 24 October 1934, Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, planted a seedling grown from one of them on the grounds of the new Australian War Memorial in Canberra. That seedling is this tree, and it has since become the most visited of every Lone Pine descendant planted around Australia and New Zealand from the same handful of cones. Every ANZAC Day it stands at the centre of the national ceremony; in 2014 the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge planted a cutting propagated directly from it during that same service, an unbroken graft back to Gallipoli that most of the country's other Lone Pines cannot claim. It lost a large limb in a storm in December 2008 and kept growing. Ninety-two years old this year, and still doing the one job asked of it: standing where people can find it every year on the day that matters.