The Australian Pine of the Botanic Garden

The garden files this tree under pino australiano, and it is not a pine. Casuarina cunninghamiana is a flowering tree from the river valleys of eastern Australia whose leaves have shrunk to rings of tiny scales along long green jointed branchlets. From ten metres away it reads as a drooping conifer. Up close there is not a needle on it, and nothing else in this garden resembles it. At 33.6 metres it is one of the tallest trees here, on a trunk 3.49 metres round carrying a narrow crown of 18.4 metres. In Australia the species is planted to hold riverbanks together, its roots fixing nitrogen in poor sandy soil. Here it stands in the Escola Botanica among the teaching collection, doing nothing more useful than being large and strange. One caveat, stated plainly. The Generalitat's monumental tree register maps this individual trunk with its own entry, coordinates and measurements. The garden's own catalogue confirms that the species grows in this collection, but that page describes the species rather than this particular tree, so the second source corroborates what it is and not which trunk it is. On the ground it is hard to mistake, because a Casuarina looks like nothing around it. We would rather say this than imply a confirmation we do not have. No age is recorded for it anywhere.