The Port Jackson Fig of Vaucluse House

Two records date this fig and they land a few years apart. Museums of History NSW puts the giant Port Jackson fig at the eastern corner of Vaucluse House in the mid-1850s. The State Heritage Register listing for the property calls it a Port Jackson fig of about 1859. Neither is a planting receipt, so the honest answer is that it went in somewhere inside that window, roughly 170 years ago, and nobody has narrowed it since. It was planted as part of a fashion. Sydney's villa gardens were being laid out in the Thomas Shepherd manner, with specimen trees placed for effect on lawns meant to be walked across, and this fig is one of the survivors of that generation of planting. The Port Jackson fig is the local species rather than the imported showpiece, and it grows into exactly the wide, dark, low-branching shape those gardens were designed around. A century and a half on, it is doing what it was placed there to do. Be careful which fig you are told about. A separate Moreton Bay fig stood between the house and the tea rooms until 1996, when it was removed and replaced by a cutting. Different tree, other side of the house. The pleasure garden is free and open Wednesday to Sunday, ten until four, with only the house interior ticketed. Our pin is good to the eastern side of the house rather than to the trunk.