The tallest thing in the Jardim da Cordoaria is Australian.
Photo: Paulo V. Araujo, Dias com Arvores
Bunya Pine
Araucaria bidwillii
The bunya pine drops the heaviest cone of any conifer on earth: up to ten kilograms, roughly a bowling ball, from a crown that can be twenty-eight metres up. We map 11 of them, in 9 cities.
In southeast Queensland, the only place it grows wild, the trees fruit heavily every few years, and Aboriginal groups travelled hundreds of kilometres for the gatherings that followed. Australian parks now sign and fence them for the obvious reason. Europe planted them for the silhouette instead: a straight column with branches in flat symmetrical whorls and leaves stiff enough to draw blood. Porto's is the tallest thing in the Jardim da Cordoaria at roughly 40 metres. Bucaco's is five metres round beside a hotel that was still a Carmelite convent when it was planted. Barcelona's has been in the Teatre Grec gardens since about 1920.
Porto
Brisbane
John Hargreaves planted a pair of Bunya pines in 1891 at the gate of his fruit farm and cannery in Manly West, a property called Woondall for the spring that watered it.
Barcelona
A bunya pine drops cones the size of a football that can weigh ten kilograms, from seventeen metres up.
Los Angeles
El Pino is a pine that is not a pine, on a lot nobody may enter, and East Los Angeles once petitioned to save it from a felling that was never coming.
Palermo
A bunya pine drops cones that weigh as much as a bowling ball.
Genoa
A register once mislabelled this tree's girth as its diameter, which would have made the trunk over six metres wide rather than six metres round, a mistake plausible enough that nobody caught it un...
Photo: Terensky (CC BY 3.0)
Catania
Italy's national register of monumental trees records this bunya pine at 45 metres tall.
Photo: Ivan Ruggiero (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Forty centimetres of trunk is the whole difference between this bunya pine and the one standing twenty to thirty metres away.
Photo: Alacoolwiki (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Coimbra
The University of Coimbra's botanical garden grows seven different species of araucaria.
A few dozen metres from Europe's tallest tree stands the tallest bunya pine in Portugal, on the same path in the same small forest.
Bucaco
Do not stand under this one in a bad year.
Photo: Fundacao Mata do Bucaco
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