The Holm Oak of St David's Cathedral

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.