An avenue of six Cook Pines was proposed for the ground in front of the old Parliament House in 1868.
Cook Pine
Araucaria columnaris
Cook pine comes from one stretch of the Pacific, New Caledonia's Isle of Pines, where eighteenth-century sailors mistook its narrow, leaning columns for stone and named the island after the mistake. We map 4 of them, in 4 cities.
Planted as an ornamental far from home, it tends to end up the tallest thing around: Brisbane's, one of two set out by Prince Albert, Duke of Edinburgh, in 1868, is now the tallest tree in the City Botanic Gardens at forty-five metres. Lima's stands inside a seventeenth-century Spanish olive grove and has already outgrown trees three centuries older than it. Palermo's rises thirty-eight metres over Villa Tasca's swan lake, the pine on one shore answering a fig tree's shade on the other.
Brisbane
Alicante
Alicante's own walking route for its notable trees calls this the tallest on it: fifty metres, by the city's tree catalogue and by the contractor who maintains it, both citing the same figure indep...
Palermo
Villa Tasca's swan lake has a fig tree spreading permanent shade over one shore and a very different tree standing on the other: a Cook pine, thirty-eight metres tall by the national register's own...
Lima
San Isidro calls this one of the tallest trees in Lima, and it is also the youngest thing in the grove it stands in by about three centuries.
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