The Yellow Christmas Tree of Stanyan Street

The pohutukawa, the New Zealand Christmas tree, flowers red. This one flowers yellow. The yellow form began as a natural mutation, found on Motiti Island in New Zealand's Bay of Plenty in 1940, in a species that otherwise blooms crimson. Victor Reiter got hold of a cutting in the late 1950s and his family planted it in front of their home at 1221 Stanyan Street, on the edge of Cole Valley. The local tree writer Mike Sullivan, writing in 2016, called it his favourite tree in the city and found it thriving more than seventy years after that first yellow plant turned up. In 2019 the Urban Forestry Council voted unanimously to make it an official Landmark Tree. Its moment comes around Memorial Day, at the end of May, when it blooms, and the flowers can still cover it in late June. Every other New Zealand Christmas tree you pass in the city flowers red. This is a front garden, not a park, and the right way to see it is from the public pavement on Stanyan Street, without stepping off it. Our pin marks the address rather than the trunk. The city still lists it among its landmark trees, but the newest dated photograph we have found is from June 2012, when it was in full yellow flower. Nobody has published its girth. If you photograph it from the pavement in flower, send it to us.