The Giant Sequoia of the Mirabellgarten

The best measurement anyone has of this tree was taken by a geocacher with a tape measure in December 2019: just under six metres around the base. Not a survey, and the only number there is. It is a giant sequoia, Sequoiadendron giganteum, a Californian tree standing in an Austrian baroque garden. It is not alone in that. A coast redwood grows beside it, so the pair on the right of the path, just before the turn into the Bastionsgarten, are both imports from the far side of a continent and an ocean. Neither of them arrived by accident. Somebody chose them, planted them and then let them do the one thing a formal garden is not otherwise for, which is grow upward without being cut back. Nobody wrote down when that happened. No planting date and no age has surfaced for either tree, which leaves the sequoia the least documented thing in a garden people cross all day long. If you have found a record of when they went in, send it and it goes on the page. Getting there is the easy part. The Mirabellgarten is public and open daily, a few minutes from Mirabellplatz, and the turn to the Bastionsgarten is now a children's playground. Our pin comes from the geocache waypoint rather than a survey mark, which in a garden this size still puts you within a few metres of the right trees.