The Araucaria of Monserrate

The tallest tree in one of Portugal's most exotic gardens came from an island most of its visitors couldn't place on a map. Francis Cook, the English textile magnate who bought the crumbling Monserrate estate in 1856, spent the following decades turning its grounds into a private arboretum stitched together from wherever his money could reach: Mexico, the Himalayas, Australia, and this Araucaria heterophylla, native only to a single island in the Tasman Sea, Norfolk Island, some 1,600 kilometres from the Australian mainland it is usually filed under. Planted in Monserrate's mid-19th century expansion, it now stands over 50 metres tall with a crown spreading 22 metres across, by most measurements the tallest tree in the entire garden and a strong candidate for the tallest on mainland Portugal. It grows at the low point of the grounds, beside the ornamental lake, so that visitors coming down through Cook's Himalayan and Mexican plantings see it rising above everything else before they reach the water. Cook never lived to see the tree reach anything like its current size. What he built instead was a garden designed to keep growing into something stranger than he planted, and this conifer, alone among everything else at Monserrate, decided to do that by going straight up.