The Miramar Moreton Bay Fig

The hotel arrived second. This fig was planted around 1889 in the rose garden of the Jones mansion by Georgina Jones, whose husband, Senator John Percival Jones, had founded Santa Monica a decade and a half earlier. The mansion is long gone. The tree went on growing and the Fairmont Miramar was built around it, which is why a five star hotel now has a Moreton Bay fig standing in its front courtyard like a doorman. It is over 80 feet tall with a canopy about 120 feet across, one of the largest of its kind in California. Moreton Bay figs come from the Australian east coast and were planted all over southern California in the 1880s by people who wanted shade quickly and got rather more than they bargained for; this is the specimen that shows why. Santa Monica made it a city landmark on 17 August 1976, among its first, citing both the tree and its link to the family that started the town. Nobody has published a girth for it, so if you get a tape around the trunk we would like the number. You can walk straight up to it from Ocean Avenue, free and at any hour, but this is a working hotel entrance rather than a park, so read the room.