The Yate of Burnley Gardens

Yate grows wild on a strip of coast in the far south-west of Western Australia and almost nowhere else. This one is 18 metres tall and about four metres round, on the other side of the continent. Eucalyptus cornuta takes its name from its buds, which taper to a long horn before the flowers open. A tree of this size well outside its range is the kind of thing a university's botanic garden accumulates: Burnley Gardens holds close to a thousand plant species across nine hectares, free to walk into, and the City of Yarra's register lists this one for its outstanding size and its place in the landscape. Most of the trees on this page carry the register's blanket band of over a hundred years. This one got a narrower reading, 81 to 100 years at the survey on 4 October 2012, which puts the planting somewhere between roughly 1926 and 1945. Somebody looked and made a closer call, which is worth saying, because almost nowhere else on this page did they. The measurements: 127 centimetres of diameter at breast height, so a girth of about 3.99 metres, converted from a diameter, which is what the register publishes rather than a circumference. Nothing outside that register names this tree. If you can date the Burnley yate, or have watched it flower here, tell us.