The Chavez Ravine Arboretum Kauri

Long reputed as one of the oldest Queensland kauri in the United States, this one is not in a botanical garden. It stands on an open hillside above Dodger Stadium's parking lots, in a public park with no gate, no staff and no admission. Chavez Ravine Arboretum was planted in 1893, which makes it one of the oldest collections of trees in Los Angeles and older than the stadium that now wraps around part of the ravine. More than a hundred species went into that slope. The kauri is the one both published accounts of the place single out: Agathis robusta, a Queensland rainforest conifer that grows into a smooth grey column, long described locally as the biggest and oldest of its kind in the country. That reputation now has a rival: a Huntington kauri across town, actually measured, holds the documented California Big Tree record for the species. This one has never been measured at all. The arboretum around it is Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument number 48, a formal way of saying the city noticed late that a Victorian planting experiment had turned into a forest. Nobody has published a girth, a height or a planting date for this particular tree, so the old claim rests on the arboretum's age rather than on anyone's tape measure. Our pin marks the arboretum, not the trunk, so you will be walking the hill to find it. If you do find it, tell us where it stands.