The Bidwill Kauri Pine

The seed was picked on New Year's Day, 1849, at Maryborough in Queensland, by John Carne Bidwill, the first director of the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney. It went into the Palm Grove in 1853 and the tree that came up is still standing there, more than 170 years later, pushing well clear of the palm canopy around it as one of the tallest things in the garden. It is the Garden's type specimen of Queensland kauri, the first of the species planted here, and other kauris in Sydney get measured against it. A 2015 heritage survey of the Domain does exactly that: a companion kauri on Central Avenue, 31 metres tall with a canopy 16 metres across, is described as approaching the size of the 1853 tree in the Palm Grove. It has not caught up. Kauris are slow and can run past 300 years, so at 170 this one is barely middle-aged. What it has instead is priority. Nobody has published a trunk measurement for it, so if you get a tape around it we would like the figure. And our pin marks a point in the Palm Grove rather than the trunk itself, so allow a minute of standing among the palms and looking up. You are looking for the one that overtops the palms.