The Norfolk Island Pine of Ingle Hall

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.