The Brazilian Pepper of Third and Yosemite

One of San Francisco's official Landmark Trees grows on a traffic island. Public Works lists it in a handful of words, 3rd Street and Yosemite Median Triangle: Brazilian Pepper, and the city's street-tree survey adds the number that explains the honour: a trunk 48 inches across, about 3.8 metres round. That figure comes from a map survey of unknown date, so read it as the city's measurement rather than a fresh one. Even so, it makes this a very large pepper tree, standing where 3rd Street meets Yosemite Avenue in the Bayview with traffic moving on every side. What we know of its recent life is thin. A visitor on a landmark tree tour in 2010 called it ancient and found it had lost branches in storms. The city's list and its tree register still carry it as a Landmark tree, but a register does not record whether a tree is alive, and we have found no recent photograph of this trunk. If you pass it, a picture from the pavement would settle the question. Nobody has published when it was planted, and three searches turned up no history for it at all. If you know when it went in, or how a tree this size came to be growing on a traffic island, tell us. Look from the pavement and mind the traffic on 3rd Street. The thirteen landmark palms of Quesada Avenue are about half a kilometre to the north-east.