The Twin Giants of Sternwartepark

Two trees, planted side by side, share a single protection order. In the Sternwartepark, in the shadow of Vienna's university observatory, a ginkgo and a giant sequoia grow close enough together that Vienna registered them as one natural monument in 2010, Naturdenkmal Nr. 817, rather than two. They make an odd pair. The ginkgo, a living fossil native to China, was already around a century old when it was surveyed, with a trunk 2.35 metres around and a height of 24 metres. Next to it stands a Californian giant sequoia that has grown taller, 27 metres, but leans noticeably as it climbs, its 3.75 metre trunk curving rather than running straight up the way most conifers do. Neither species is native within a continent of Vienna, and the two would never have met each other in the wild, yet here they have spent a century as neighbours a few streets from Türkenschanzpark, itself planted with exotic species through Vienna university's old botanical connections. The observatory nearby, the largest structurally closed telescope building in the world when it opened in 1879, gives the whole park its name. Astronomers looking skyward have had these two very different giants growing at ground level the entire time.