The Old Jarrah Tree

In 1997 vandals ringbarked this jarrah, a cut that should have finished it. Three quarters of its canopy is dead or gone and earlier lopping had already taken roughly half its height, but it answered the ringbarking with epicormic shoots along its northern side and it is still assessed as stable. Alive, in other words, and visibly not unharmed. What happened next is the part worth knowing. 1,147 people wrote to the state government asking for the tree to be protected. A conservation order followed on 14 November 1997, a heritage agreement in 2002, and in 2003 it went onto the State Heritage Register, one of only three trees or groups of trees listed in all of Western Australia. The register estimates it at 400 to 800 years old. That is a wide band because nobody has dated it more closely than the bulk and growth form of an old-growth jarrah allow, and we would rather give you the band than a tidy number. From 1904 until 1987 it stood beside Armadale Primary School and generations of children played under it. The school has gone. The tree and the ground are still there, now beside a public carpark. Two things to know before you go. Our pin marks the cross-street rather than the trunk, so expect to look around. And we have not confirmed whether the ground right around the tree is fenced, so count on seeing it and not on reaching it.