The Larger Bunya Pine of Villa Bellini

Italy's national register of monumental trees records this bunya pine at 45 metres tall. That figure does not hold up. A second registry measured the same specimen at about 22 metres, and 45 would be remarkable for an Araucaria bidwillii growing anywhere outside its native forest. The trunk measurements agree far better, 3.40 metres around on the national sheet against 3.33 on the other, and that is the more useful number anyway. The species grows wild in a few pockets of southeast Queensland and nowhere else on earth. It builds a dark, symmetrical dome on a straight column of a trunk, carries stiff glossy leaves in spirals along the branches, and drops cones weighing several kilograms from the top of the crown, which is why Australian parks sign the ground underneath them. Villa Bellini holds a whole collection of araucarias, the Norfolk Island pine, the Cook pine and the hoop pine among them, but only two are individually listed as monumental: this one and its neighbour, twenty to thirty metres away across the garden. From the path they read as a pair, and there is no reason to see them as anything else. No source records an age for either. Nobody wrote the planting down, and the two registries that took the trunks in hand did not attempt a figure.