The Miller Pine

This 31-metre pine is growing out of a street planter because a florist put it in the ground before there was a street. Through the 1870s and 1880s this stretch of Goose Hollow lay outside the city limits and belonged to Henry Miller, one of Portland's first florists, who ran a plant nursery, a seed farm and a floral supply business on the slope. The Austrian pine and a large Cedar of Lebanon a short way off both appear to be imports he planted on his own nursery ground. They were stock and demonstration rather than landscaping, which is why they sit where no landscape architect would have put them. The register dates the planting to the late 19th century and added the tree to the Heritage list in 1993. It is roughly 31.1 metres tall with a trunk 3.23 metres around, rising out of a built-out planter at an intersection that did not exist when it was young. There is photographic proof of its head start. A 1959 photograph of the Jacob Kamm House, a few blocks east, catches this pine and its cedar neighbour already full grown in the background. What it has watched is a semi-rural nursery district becoming one of the densest neighbourhoods in Portland, with an interstate cut through beside it.