What is the oldest tree in Canberra?
Canberra's Lone Pine, on the grounds of the Australian War Memorial, is a 92 year old Aleppo Pine grown from a cone Sergeant Benjamin Smith carried home from the 1915 Gallipoli campaign. Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, planted it on 24 October 1934, and it remains the centre of the national ANZAC Day ceremony.
The name comes from the battle, not the tree standing today. Lone Pine Ridge at Gallipoli took its name from a single Aleppo pine that stood there before August 1915, when Australian and New Zealand forces fought one of the campaign's bloodiest actions to take it; the original tree did not survive the battle. Sergeant Benjamin Smith picked up cones from the wreckage and brought them home, and seedlings grown from them were planted at memorial sites around Australia and New Zealand through the 1930s. Canberra's, planted in 1934 on the grounds of the new Australian War Memorial, became the most visited and most commemorated of them all. It has supplied cuttings for further plantings, including one propagated directly from it and planted by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge during the 2014 ANZAC Day National Ceremony, a direct graft-line back to Gallipoli that most of its sibling trees elsewhere cannot claim. It lost a large limb in a storm in December 2008 and kept growing. It is free to visit on the Memorial's public grounds, reachable on foot from central Canberra.
One of Canberra's trees also appears in The Trees the World Has Written About.