The Buddhist Pine of White Hall

It is not a pine, it is not a yew, and it holds a state record. Podocarpus macrophyllus comes from Japan and southern China and is sold across the world as a clipped hedge or a patio plant, which is why the largest one recorded in Nevada is a 24-foot specimen pressed against the side of White Hall on the UNLV campus. The Nevada Big Tree Register measured it in 2015 at 20 inches around, 24 feet tall, 13 feet across. That is the slimmest trunk in this city's entry by a distance. Big-tree registers work species by species rather than by absolute size, so a champion is simply the largest known example of its kind, and for a plant most people keep in a container, this is what the ceiling looks like. UNLV reported the same 24 feet in November 2025, in landscaping that has recently been redone around it. No age is recorded and none can be derived: there is no published growth rate for this species under desert irrigation, and inventing one would be worse than leaving the field empty. If you know when it was planted, tell us. The coordinates mark the building, not the trunk. Once you are there it is easy: dark, leathery, narrow leaves in dense whorls, like a yew hedge that got away from somebody.