The Beverly Hills Moreton Bay Fig

Everyone in Beverly Hills tells the same story about this fig and nobody has produced the paperwork. The story is that Burton Green planted it: the oil man who founded the city in 1906, laid out Beverly Gardens Park and hired Wilbur D. Cook to design it. The park's history is documented and the tree's is not, so treat the planting as local tradition rather than record. The tree itself needs no defending. It is over a century old, it gets described as one of the largest Moreton Bay figs in the country, and it stands beside the Electric Fountain at Santa Monica and Wilshire, the 1931 fountain given to the city by the family of the silent film comedian Harold Lloyd. The fountain gets the photographs. The fig is the older object and by some distance the stranger one, a low wide dome of a tree with limbs that run out almost horizontally before they think about going up. Beverly Gardens Park is a long thin public park running for blocks along Santa Monica Boulevard, open at all hours and free. The pin marks the fountain rather than the trunk, and the tree stands beside it. No girth and no planting year have been published. If you know either, we would like to hear it.