The Hoop Pine of Yarra Boulevard

The road this tree is named after was built by men on relief work. Yarra Boulevard was cut through Richmond Park in the 1930s by sustenance labourers, according to the heritage citation for the parkland, and the City of Yarra's register already had the hoop pine beside it down as over a hundred years old when it was updated in 2012. Whether this tree watched the road arrive is an open question. Nobody recorded when it was planted, and nothing ties it to the Boulevard's own avenue scheme, so the two dates sit there side by side without a document to join them. What is certain: 3.46 metres round, 22 metres tall, in parkland that has been public since 1862, registered as particularly old and of outstanding size. Araucaria cunninghamii is a rainforest tree from Queensland and northern New South Wales, an emergent that pushes its head above the canopy and holds its foliage in tufts at the ends of the branches, which gives an old one a candelabra look from a distance. It is planted all over southern Australia and is at home in none of it. It stands about 260 metres from the osage orange already on this page and roughly 550 from the river red gum, so all three make one walk along the Boulevard. Only the register names this individual tree.