The Giant Sequoias of the Botanical Gardens

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.