The Moreton Bay Fig of Balboa Park

This fig went into the ground as a five-gallon sapling. That was 1914, planted for the San Diego County garden exhibit at the Panama-California Exposition the year after, and it is the last plant from that exhibit still alive. A survey for the California Registry of Big Trees in 1996 put it at 24 metres tall with a crown 37 metres across and a trunk 12.3 metres round, though that last figure is a buttressed fig mass rather than one clean stem. Moreton Bay figs do not so much grow a trunk as accumulate one. Its worst years came from being admired. Decades of visitors walking the ground under the crown compacted the soil and damaged the surface roots, and by the 1980s the tree was going backwards. In 1989 it was trimmed and the ground beneath it fenced off. It recovered. The aerial roots now hanging from the limbs are the sign of a fig doing well rather than merely holding on. Some accounts credit the planting to Kate Sessions, who supplied a great deal of what grows in this park. The Natural History Museum, whose north entrance the tree stands outside, says flatly that there is no documentation for that. A hundred and twelve years on, nobody knows whose hands put it in. The measurements above are thirty years old. The tree has not stopped growing since.