The Bottle Tree of the English Garden

An Australian bottle tree, also called a kurrajong at home, stands thirty-five metres tall in a Bourbon queen's garden, roughly twice the height the species usually reaches. Brachychiton populneus grows across the dry eastern half of Australia, where most specimens top out somewhere between fifteen and twenty metres. The register puts this one at thirty-five, with three metres sixty around the trunk, which makes it an exceptional tree for the species by a wide margin. Kurrajong belongs to the mallow family, alongside cotton, cacao and the baobab, and it shares the baobab's habit of storing water in a swollen trunk. Australian graziers cut the branches to feed stock through drought, the fibrous bark was worked into cord, and the seeds are edible once roasted. None of that has ever been asked of this one. It stands in the English Garden at the top of the Reggia's grounds, the informal twenty-three hectares laid out from 1786 for a queen who wanted a botanical collection rather than another parterre, and it has spent its whole life being watered by an aqueduct and looked at. The Campania register credits it with about a hundred and fifty years. That figure is the register's own estimate rather than a ring count, and the national list carries the same trunk, the same height and no age at all.