The Douglas Fir of the Botanical Gardens

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.