The Southern Mahogany of Edinburgh Gardens

This is a beach tree living in Fitzroy North. Eucalyptus botryoides belongs to the sandy, salt-touched country of the south-east Australian coast, behind dunes and around swamp margins, and it does not turn up this far inland on its own. Somebody carried it here and planted it, in a park laid out from 1862 whose heritage citation notes the number of mature specimen trees put in from that period onward. Which of those plantings this one belongs to is written down nowhere we can find. The City of Yarra measured it in 2012 at 4.34 metres round and 25 metres tall, called it over a hundred years old then, and tagged it three ways on the significant trees register: particularly old, outstanding size, and its standing in the landscape. Over a hundred in 2012 makes it comfortably over 110 now. It is also the third registered giant on this page within about 250 metres of Alfred Crescent, which is the useful thing to know if you are walking. The river red gum is roughly a hundred metres away and the holm oak a little beyond that, and the council's register lists seventeen more significant trees along the same stretch of grass. One honest caveat: the register is the only document that names this individual tree. The heritage listing describes the park's tree collection and does not single it out.