Queensland Kauri

Sydney's, in the Royal Botanic Garden's Palm Grove, grew from a seed picked on New Year's Day 1849 by the garden's first director and is the type specimen every other Sydney kauri gets measured against, still ahead of its nearest rival after more than 170 years. Hobart's, in the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, reaches 39 metres and is rare enough to carry four separate significance ratings on the city's tree register, aesthetic, dimensions, age and rarity, where most trees earn one or two. Los Angeles has the oldest and largest kauri in the United States, and it needs no ticket or gate: it stands on an open hillside above Dodger Stadium's parking lots, in the Chavez Ravine Arboretum planted in 1893. Kauris are slow and can run past 300 years, so none of these three, barely two centuries old at most, has finished growing.