The Sugar Gum of Burnley Gardens

Burnley Gardens' best known sugar gum is a table. The heritage-listed specimen on the entrance drive, dated to about 1887, dropped limbs once too often and came down in 2008; its timber was carved and the table unveiled in 2013. This is a different tree, and this one is alive. It stands further into the grounds, and the City of Yarra recorded it on 4 October 2012, four years after that removal: 22 metres tall, 144 centimetres of diameter at breast height, which works out at roughly 4.52 metres of girth. That 144 is a width measured across the trunk, not a tape run around it. Particularly old, outstanding size, location of landscape context, in the register's own words. The age is the band and nothing more, over a hundred years, with no year behind it. What says it is still standing is an iNaturalist record from September 2025, research grade, of a living Eucalyptus cladocalyx within about 25 metres of the register's point. Whether that photograph and that survey are the same trunk is inference rather than record, though nothing planted since 2008 could be this thick. Sugar gums have a local reputation for shedding branches, which University of Melbourne researchers restated as recently as 2024. It is part of why an old one still upright in a public garden is worth the walk.