Hobart's significant trees split neatly into two short loops. Four stand on city streets within about 650 metres, including a Norfolk Island pine of the species whose brittle masts disappointed Cook's crew and three dawn redwoods of a tree known only from fossils until 1941. The other three are inside the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, founded in 1818 and the second oldest in Australia, where a Douglas fir planted in 1894 is older than the country it stands in.
0 of 10 visited in Hobart
1
The Holm Oak of St David's Cathedral
Holm Oak (Quercus ilex) · roughly a century, unconfirmed · Hobart CBD
Hobart has been raising this oak's replacements from its own acorns since 2020, which tells you how the original is doing. It stands on the corner of Murray and Macquarie Streets outside St David's Cathedral, at what the National Trust calls the finest colonial intersection in Australia: four corners of nineteenth-century sandstone, and one evergreen oak holding down the fourth. The City of Hobart's significant tree register lists it twice over, once for outstanding aesthetic significance and once for outstanding dimensions. When the National Trust measured it in March 2014 it was 16 metres tall with a two-metre girth and a condition rating of Good. By September 2023 the city's own arborists reported that it had been in decline for some years despite everything maintenance could do. Photographs from that month show it standing and in leaf, with one seedling of its own germinated in 2020 growing on beside it and several more saplings raised from its acorns. Its age is the part nobody can prove. The story people tell in Hobart is that it grew from an acorn brought back from Gallipoli after 1915 and planted for the men who did not come back, which would put it a little over a century old. No document supports that. The size fits, the tradition is real, the paperwork is missing, and the propagation programme is the city covering itself either way.
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2
The Dawn Redwoods of Elizabeth Street
Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) · not documented · Hobart CBD
Until 1941 this species was known only from fossils. Botanists had described Metasequoia from imprints in stone and filed it under extinct, and then living trees turned up in a valley in Hubei province, China. Every dawn redwood outside that valley descends from seed collected there in 1947 and posted around the world, which makes the three on the road reserve outside 81 Elizabeth Street the great-grandchildren of a botanical resurrection. There are three of them, within about twenty metres of each other in front of the former Commonwealth Bank building, and the City of Hobart's significant tree register treats them as a single record rather than three, because the group is the point. Its reasoning is unusually direct: the trees together provide a striking aesthetic in a sparsely vegetated part of the city, and they are locally very recognisable. Stand at the kerb and you get all three at once. That register is also all there is. No other source names these trees, and no planting date is recorded anywhere, so their age is genuinely unknown, with one hard ceiling: nobody outside China could have planted one before 1947. Dawn redwood is one of the few conifers that sheds its needles, so the trio go coppery and then bare through a Tasmanian winter and come back feathery green in spring, which for a fossil is a reasonable annual performance.
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3
The Norfolk Island Pine of Ingle Hall
Norfolk Island Pine (Araucaria heterophylla) · not documented · Hobart CBD
Asked in 2025 to name his favourite tree in Hobart, the owner of the New Town Station Nursery picked this one, and his reason was that it never changes much. Norfolk Island pines grow slowly and hold their shape, a stack of horizontal branch tiers running up a near-perfect vertical, and this one has kept its corner of Macquarie and Argyle Streets while the buildings around it got taller. The City of Hobart's register singles out its trunk: it forks into two co-dominant leaders, which on most conifers reads as a fault and on this one reads as character. It stands outside Ingle Hall, one of the oldest Georgian buildings in the city, now part of the University of Tasmania's Conservatorium of Music, so on a good day the tree comes with a soundtrack. The species is native to one small island in the Pacific, 1,400 km off the Australian east coast. Cook's crew, arriving there in 1774, looked at those dead-straight trunks and saw masts for the Royal Navy; the timber turned out to be too brittle for the job. As ornamental trees for windy southern ports they have done considerably better, and Hobart is about as far south as a port gets. No planting date was ever recorded, so nobody can tell you how old it is.
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4
The Bhutan Cypress of Brisbane Street
Bhutan Cypress (Cupressus torulosa) · not documented · Hobart CBD
This tree is on Hobart's significant tree register for one stated reason: its loss would be detrimental to the community. Not size, not age, not rarity. The Bhutan cypress at 67 Brisbane Street earned its place as a shape, a dark green cone running straight up out of the footpath, holding a vertical line on a street that otherwise runs horizontal. It is a long way from home. Cupressus torulosa grows wild in the dry inner valleys of the Himalaya, through northern India, Nepal and Bhutan, at altitudes that hand it thin air, hard sun and freezing nights, and across that range it is the tree planted around temples and monasteries. It is uncommon as a street tree in Australia, so the reason to walk past is simply that you are unlikely to meet another one on the way. The register carries no age for it and no measurements, and no other source names it at all. What you get is the council's judgement and your own eyes, which is honest ground for a tree whose whole case rests on how it looks from the pavement. It makes the smallest claim of any tree on this list and the claim holds: a Himalayan conifer, on an ordinary Hobart street, that a city looked at and decided it would rather not lose.
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5
The Douglas Fir of the Botanical Gardens
Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) · about 130 years · Queens Domain
This tree is older than Australia. It went into the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens in 1894, seven years before the colonies federated into a country, and it has been growing on the same ground ever since. The National Trust measured it in March 2014 at 30 metres tall with a trunk a metre through, and rated its condition Excellent, which for a North American conifer half a world from the Pacific Northwest is a good result. It stands in the Gardens' conifer collection, laid out mostly in the nineteenth century and described by the Gardens themselves as one of the most significant of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. The Gardens were founded in 1818 and are the second oldest in Australia, and the planting logic of the period is still legible on the ground: rows of northern timber trees brought south to find out whether they would take. This one took. Douglas fir is the great timber tree of the American west, the species that framed most of the twentieth century's houses there, and it is normally met in a plantation, packed tight and pruned by its neighbours. Here it is a specimen with room around it, lower branches kept, the whole shape visible from the path. Entry is free, and the gates are open daily from 8am, closing at 5pm between April and September and at 6.30pm from October to March.
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6
The Queensland Kauri of the Botanical Gardens
Queensland Kauri (Agathis robusta) · not documented · Queens Domain
This tree is listed under four separate headings on Hobart's significant tree register: aesthetic significance, outstanding dimensions, venerable age, and rarity. Every other tree on this list carries one or two. The Queensland kauri stands 39 metres in the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, measured by the National Trust in March 2014 and rated Excellent, and it has been on the Trust's books since December 1994. The oddity is where it is. Agathis robusta is a rainforest tree from coastal Queensland and the Atherton Tableland, warm and wet by temperament, and Hobart sits at 42 degrees south with frost, wind off the Southern Ocean and a winter Queensland has never heard of. It ought to be sulking. Instead it is one of the tallest things in the garden. Kauri are among the longest-lived conifers on earth, and they grow a clean columnar trunk that runs branchless for a long way before the crown starts, which is precisely why the timber was cut out of Australian and New Zealand forests so quickly in the nineteenth century: a kauri log is almost all usable wood. Nobody recorded when this one was planted. The register calls it venerable and gives no number, and neither does the National Trust. The Gardens charge nothing to enter, opening at 8am daily and closing at 5pm from April to September, 6.30pm through the warmer half of the year.
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7
The Giant Sequoias of the Botanical Gardens
Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) · about 147 years · Queens Domain
There are two of them, they went in together in 1879, and they still mark the entrance drive of the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens. The National Trust measured the pair in March 2014 at 36 metres tall with trunks two metres through and rated them Excellent. At 147 years old they are barely started: giant sequoias routinely pass 2,000 years, and the largest living one in California is reckoned at over two millennia. Hobart's register still lists them under a nineteenth-century name, Big Tree or Wellingtonia, which is a fossil of an old argument. When seed first reached Britain in 1853 the species was named Wellingtonia gigantea after the recently dead Duke of Wellington. American botanists objected and countered with Washingtonia. The fight was not settled until 1939, when the tree finally got the neutral name it carries now, and seed had reached Tasmania well before that, which is roughly when these two went into the ground. They are the first trees you pass coming through the gates, which is the standard Victorian use for a species that gardeners of the period regarded as the largest living thing anyone had heard of. They have another eighteen centuries to make good on it. There is no admission charge; the gates open at 8am daily and close at 5pm from April to September, 6.30pm from October to March.
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8
The Chir Pine of the Botanical Gardens
Chir Pine (Pinus roxburghii) · not documented · Queens Domain
Hobart's register calls this the Longleaved Indian Pine, and the name is the best short description of it. Chir pine carries needles up to thirty centimetres long in bundles of three, and they droop, so a mature tree looks nothing like the stiff dark cone most people picture when they hear the word pine. It looks loose and shaggy, closer to a green waterfall. The species comes from the outer Himalaya, the dry foothill belt running from Pakistan through northern India into Nepal, where it is the resin pine, tapped for turpentine and rosin, and where its own fallen needles are flammable enough to be a recognised cause of the region's forest fires. In the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens it is doing none of that. It grows in the pinetum, the conifer collection laid out mostly in the nineteenth century, which the Gardens describe as one of the most significant of its kind in the southern hemisphere, planted when foresters were systematically testing which northern timber trees would take to a Tasmanian climate. The City of Hobart lists it for its appearance, its dimensions and its age, and records no number for any of the three. Its second page is an aerial photograph with an arrow on it, which is the city saying that finding this tree matters more than measuring it.
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9
The Pedunculate Oak of the Botanical Gardens
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · not documented · Queens Domain
This oak is not on Hobart's significant tree register for being large or old. It is listed for how it looks, for being part of a historic garden, and for standing where the landscape would miss it, and the register gives no height, no girth and no age at all. That is an unusual case to make for a tree and it is the honest one here. Hobart's register calls the species English Oak; this page uses Pedunculate Oak, the neutral name for Quercus robur, the same tree under a less proprietary label. It is the oak the British planted wherever they settled, and Tasmania suited it better than most of Australia did: cool, wet and far enough south that an oak can behave the way it does at home instead of merely surviving. In the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens it grows near the main house and glasshouse complex, in a garden founded in 1818 and the second oldest in the country. The Gardens hold more than one English oak, which is worth knowing if you go looking; this is the one the city registered, marked with an arrow on the register's own aerial photograph. Nobody has published a planting date for it, so how old it is remains genuinely open. Entry is free and the gates open at 8am daily.
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10
The Spotted Gum of the Botanical Gardens
Spotted Gum (Corymbia maculata) · not documented · Queens Domain
Every other tree on this page came from somewhere else. A Douglas fir out of Oregon, a kauri from the Queensland rainforest, two sequoias from California, a Himalayan cypress, a Norfolk Island pine, three dawn redwoods descended from one Chinese valley. This one is Australian, which on a list of Hobart's remarkable trees turns out to be the exception rather than the rule. Be precise about it, though. Corymbia maculata grows wild along the coast of New South Wales and into southern Queensland and does not occur naturally in Tasmania, so it is native to the country and not to the island, and it was planted here for the same reason as all the rest: a nineteenth century botanical garden collecting specimens from everywhere it could reach. The bark is why to walk over. Spotted gums shed theirs in irregular patches through the warmer months, leaving a smooth trunk mottled in grey, cream, olive and pink that shifts as the year goes on, and no two trees carry the same pattern. The City of Hobart lists it for its appearance, its dimensions and its place in a historic garden, and as with every Gardens entry on that register it records no measurements and no planting date, so its age is unknown. Free to enter, gates open from 8am daily.
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