Walter Hill delivered his verdict on these two trees in 1872, and it is not a boast.
Weeping Fig
Ficus benjamina
The genuinely large, old weeping figs people go to see split into two very different stories. We map 3 of them, in 3 cities.
In Miriam Vale, Queensland, on the coast road to Agnes Water, one fig has grown to roughly 12 metres round and 35 metres across, doing duty since around the 1890s as the town's milk depot, its war memorial shelter and an impromptu vet's surgery, all under one crown. Brisbane's stands at the Alice Street gate of the City Botanic Gardens, about 155 years old, planted not long after the gardens themselves were founded, native ground for a species that grows wild across northern Australia and South and Southeast Asia. Lisbon's is the odd one out, five metres round in the Campo de Santana park, doing the same unlikely, enormous work eight thousand kilometres from where the species grows on its own. All three keep their leaves year-round and none has ever stopped spreading wider rather than taller, which is the whole trick of the tree.
Brisbane
Lisbon
Ficus benjamina is the tree most people know as a pot plant, the glossy thing sulking in an office corner and shedding leaves whenever somebody moves it.
Miriam Vale
No source agrees on this fig's exact age, but everyone agrees on its size.
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