The Bhutan Cypress of Burnley Gardens
In the Himalaya this species passes 30 metres. Here it stands at 13. Cupressus torulosa, the Bhutan cypress, is a mountain conifer, and the one in Burnley Gardens has had an easier life than its relatives on a Himalayan slope: open ground, no competition for light, and a botanic garden looking after it. The City of Yarra's arborists recorded it on 4 October 2012 at 103 centimetres of diameter at breast height, which converts to about 3.24 metres of girth, because the register publishes the width across a trunk rather than the distance around it. They tagged it rare or localised, and particularly old. Burnley Gardens is nine hectares holding close to a thousand plant species, run by the University of Melbourne and free to walk into, and some of the oldest trees in the city are in it. This cypress is the sort of thing a register exists for: an unusual species, grown large, in a garden where somebody planted it deliberately and then nobody wrote down when. That is the honest limit here. Nothing beyond the city's register names this individual tree, and its age is the register's blunt band, over a hundred years at the 2012 survey, with no planting year attached. If you know when the Burnley cypress went in, tell us.
Burnley Gardens, University of Melbourne Burnley campus, 500 Yarra Boulevard, Burnley VIC 3121You can recognise it by its modest height, just 13 metres, short for a species that reaches 30 in the Himalaya, on open ground. It stands in Burnley Gardens, University of Melbourne.
Free, open to the public. Burnley Gardens is a botanic garden on the University of Melbourne's Burnley campus: no gate charge and no ticket, though it is a working university campus as well as a garden.
Burnley railway station (Glen Waverley/Alamein/Belgrave/Lilydale lines) is roughly a 10 minute walk; tram route 78 runs along Swan Street nearby.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
- In the official register: City of Yarra Significant Trees register, no. 163
- City of Yarra Significant Trees register (, ref 163): dbh 103cm, height 13m, significance 'Rare or Localised, Particularly Old', surveyed 2012-10-04
- Burnley Gardens (University of Melbourne Faculty of Science) confirmed as a nine-hectare public garden of nearly 1,000 plant species including some…