The Chir Pine of the Botanical Gardens

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.