The Huntington Rose Garden Kauri

In 1908 a gardener cut through this tree's taproot and sealed the wound with a blowtorch. The tree was already 40 feet tall, and it lived. The kauri had been planted in 1890 beside the Shorb family home. When Henry Huntington's mansion was going up, the tree stood in the way, and his master horticulturist William Hertrich chose to move it rather than fell it. Cutting the taproot freed it from the ground; the blowtorch was how he meant it to survive the move. More than a century on, it is the oldest planted tree on the Huntington's grounds. It has spent that century proving him right. In September 2021, at a ceremony in the Rose Garden, it was named California's biggest Queensland kauri, the Huntington's first California Big Tree. The figures on the state register: 112 feet tall, about 34 metres, with a trunk 235 inches round, close to six metres. That is an Australian rainforest conifer standing in a rose garden in San Marino. Across town, the kauri in Elysian Park's Chavez Ravine Arboretum has long been called the largest in the country, on reputation rather than on any published measurement. This one was planted three years before that arboretum was begun, and its size is on the record.