The Queensland Kauri of the Botanical Gardens

This tree is listed under four separate headings on Hobart's significant tree register: aesthetic significance, outstanding dimensions, venerable age, and rarity. Every other tree on this list carries one or two. The Queensland kauri stands 39 metres in the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, measured by the National Trust in March 2014 and rated Excellent, and it has been on the Trust's books since December 1994. The oddity is where it is. Agathis robusta is a rainforest tree from coastal Queensland and the Atherton Tableland, warm and wet by temperament, and Hobart sits at 42 degrees south with frost, wind off the Southern Ocean and a winter Queensland has never heard of. It ought to be sulking. Instead it is one of the tallest things in the garden. Kauri are among the longest-lived conifers on earth, and they grow a clean columnar trunk that runs branchless for a long way before the crown starts, which is precisely why the timber was cut out of Australian and New Zealand forests so quickly in the nineteenth century: a kauri log is almost all usable wood. Nobody recorded when this one was planted. The register calls it venerable and gives no number, and neither does the National Trust. The Gardens charge nothing to enter, opening at 8am daily and closing at 5pm from April to September, 6.30pm through the warmer half of the year.