Photo: Dguendel (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Lisbon has bolted a metal plate to this trunk, and where the age should be it says one word: unknown.
Moreton Bay Fig
A Moreton Bay fig announces itself at ground level first: buttress roots the height of a person come snaking across the earth like walls, and the trunk they support looks less grown than poured. This page maps every moreton bay fig on the site, 59 so far across 20 cities.
In its native eastern Australia the species often starts life as a strangler high in another tree, sends roots down, and eventually stands on its own; planted in the mild coastal cities of Europe and beyond in the 19th century, it skipped the strangling and went straight to the monumental, single trees shading entire plazas within a human lifetime. It needs frost-free air, which is why every great specimen marks a mild microclimate. The Moreton Bay figs mapped so far are listed largest and oldest first.
Lisbon
Everyone in this square looks at the cypress.
A garden of a quarter of a hectare in Arroios holds a fig with a 26 metre crown, which accounts for most of the shade in the place.
Palermo
Photo: Giuseppe ME (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The most famous fig tree in Palermo is not the one in Piazza Marina, it is that tree's parent.
Italy's national register of monumental trees puts this fig's trunk system at twenty-seven metres around and the tree itself at thirty metres tall.
Photo: Margherito1 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Half of Palermo's most famous tree is dying.
Photo: FrankAdamo (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A single 1910 inventory of Villa Trabia's grounds recorded 2,790 plant species on one aristocratic estate, and one of the Ficus macrophylla planted for that collection is still standing, its trunk...
A stone pine in the Royal Gardens is slowly disappearing into a fig.
Photo: FrankAdamo (CC BY-SA 4.0)
When Delia Whitaker was buried, her funeral carriage was asked to stop under this tree.
Photo: FrankAdamo (CC BY-SA 4.0)
This fig has been Palermo's memorial wall for over three decades.
Photo: Maurizio Moro5153 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Eight metres round the trunk and eleven metres tall: this is a fig that spent its growth going sideways.
Seville
Four of Seville's biggest fig trees didn't start out on this plaza at all.
Photo: CarlosVdeHabsburgo (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Two marble columns are the only physical trace left of the pavilion this fig tree now grows inside.
A man in Seville asked the parks department in 1970 whether he could plant a tree to mark his son's birth.
Brisbane
Moreton Bay figs do not so much grow as advance.
Valencia
This promenade was a leather-tanning ground before it was a garden.
There are two giant figs here, their canopies touching so closely they read as one crown, and only one of them lets you walk up to it.
The biggest trunk in the Glorieta measures 11.35 metres around, and it belongs to a tree that may have been planted by mistake.
The smallest of Valencia's four great figs still has a trunk two people cannot reach around.
Photo: Joanbanjo (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Gardeners planted this fig by accident in 1852, confusing the young sapling for one of the 47 magnolias also going into the newly laid-out Parterre garden that year, the same year Valencia's first...
In 1957 the Turia flood came close to putting this tree's crown under water.
A garden fashion imported from the French Riviera is the reason this tree exists at all.
A trunk of 10.95 metres puts this fig in the same weight class as El Titan and the giants of the Glorieta.
Los Angeles
Photo: Jengod (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Los Angeles has protected this fig as Historic-Cultural Monument No. 19 since 1963, which makes it older on the city's list than most of the buildings on it.
On 2 March 2019 one of these figs came down during a Chinese lantern festival in the plaza.
The hotel arrived second.
Charles C.
Everyone in Beverly Hills tells the same story about this fig and nobody has produced the paperwork.
Alicante
The oldest fig in Alicante grew from a sapling taken before 1860 from the city's Agricultural Research plot, ground that is now the Jardín Botánico.
Local press calls this the largest ficus in Spain's catalogue.
Twenty-six metres is tall for a fig.
The register calls this one number I, which turns out to be a filing decision rather than a ranking: of the four figs on the square it has the third-thickest trunk.
The slimmest trunk on the square carries the second-widest crown on it.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons (panoramio) (CC BY 3.0)
Eleven and a half metres round the base, and nothing else on this walk comes close.
Seven metres of trunk holding up thirteen metres of tree.
Two registered figs stand about twenty metres apart here and they are visibly not the same tree.
Alicante's monumental-fig register carries a category most of its other trees do not: generic protection rather than the individually named local-interest status the city centre's figs hold.
Four Moreton Bay figs from the same nineteenth-century planting stand within forty metres of each other at Plaza Portal de Elche, and the trunks do not agree on how to grow.
The fourth and southernmost fig in this small grove stands nearest the point where a city gate, the Portal de Elche, once stood before Alicante pulled its walls down in the nineteenth century.
Malaga
Photo: Lilange (CC BY-SA 3.0)
This fig predates the garden built around it by decades.
Palma de Mallorca
Local naturalist writers call this without qualification the biggest tree in Palma, and the numbers back the claim: a trunk over two metres across, more than twenty metres tall, and a crown reporte...
Palma's other giant fig, planted around the same decades as the one at the Misericordia garden, grows inside the city's municipal cemetery, where it has had a century and a half to spread five mass...
Cagliari
The national register does not measure these two figs separately.
Cagliari's botanical garden was laid out in a valley the Romans had already used, on the site of an amphitheatre and a run of Punic and Roman cisterns, and it opened on 15 November 1866.
Photo: Smiley.toerist (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Twelve metres around the trunk.
Local press calls this the fig that survived the bombs.
Cadiz
Photo: Anual (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Four fig saplings carried from India by missionary nuns are the origin story behind this tree and its three siblings scattered across Cadiz.
San Francisco
Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and San Diego have the grand Moreton Bay figs.
Melbourne
This park was a hole in the ground, and prisoners dug it.
Sydney
The canopy spans more than thirty metres, in a walled cemetery of four acres.
This fig was dated by photograph.
Catania
Fourteen metres around the trunk, and a crown that reaches forty-three metres across.
Buenos Aires
Photo: Anastasiya Lvova (CC BY 3.0)
One branch of this fig reaches thirty metres out from the trunk and is over a metre thick where it leaves it.
Auckland
The largest Moreton Bay fig in New Zealand throws a crown wider than it is tall, by twenty metres.
Old Albert is twice as wide as it is tall.
Perth
Photo: Calistemon (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The trunk measures 9.4 metres around, which is a startling thing to meet on a city footpath.
Photo: Sam Wilson (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The fig has grown over the monument it shares its corner with.
San Diego
Photo: BrokenSphere (CC BY-SA 3.0)
This fig went into the ground as a five-gallon sapling.
Tenerife
This tree keeps adding trunks.
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