The River Red Gum of Burnley Gardens

The city register gives this tree a hundred years. A local account of the same garden gives one of its red gums four hundred. The register is the firmer of the two. The City of Yarra surveyed Burnley Gardens on 4 October 2012 and recorded a river red gum of 17 metres and 92 centimetres of diameter at breast height, about 2.89 metres of girth once converted, since the register measures across a trunk rather than around it. It tagged the entry remnant, which is its word for indigenous vegetation left standing rather than planted, alongside outstanding size, particularly old and significant habitat value. The age field is the coarse one: over a hundred years, no year attached. The other figure comes from a 2015 account of Burnley's Native Garden, which describes a river red gum in the south-west corner believed to exceed 400 years and to predate the European settlement of this ground. Nobody has tied that description to a particular trunk, and the Native Garden may hold more than one old red gum, so both numbers stand here and we pick neither. If you know which tree that account means, we would like to hear it. What is not in doubt is the setting. The tree stands on a bend of the Yarra, on the sort of ground where Eucalyptus camaldulensis was growing long before anyone laid a garden over it.