The Bunya Pine of the Arcos do Jardim

The University of Coimbra's botanical garden grows seven different species of araucaria. This is the one that stops people on the path. A bunya pine from southeast Queensland, it has a trunk 6.3 metres round and a crown 16.6 metres across, carried on only 19 metres of height: a tree built outward rather than upward. Its address is half the story. You reach it through the Arcos do Jardim, the arches of the Sao Sebastiao aqueduct, then climb to the upper terrace where the garden keeps its oldest exotics. That collection dates to the nineteenth century and it is not a modest one: thirty species of eucalyptus, seven araucarias, and a Moreton Bay fig that Thomas Pakenham thought worth putting in Remarkable Trees of the World. A Portuguese newspaper surveying the garden's treasures in 2018 described this terrace plainly as the part where the big trees are, some of them a century and a half old. Portugal's register of trees of public interest classified the bunya in December 2010 and recorded its age as 150 years at that measurement, which puts it around 165 now. The species is Australian and this tree has never seen its own continent. Everything else about the setting, from the aqueduct arches to the terrace walls, is Coimbra.