IS there a tree more quintessentially Australian than the Morteon Bay fig?
The evergreens were favoured by early settlers and can be found in most towns on the east coast. They sprawl, spread and offer shade. They’re fun to climb. Some reach heights of 60 metres.
About the start of the 20th century, Joseph Maiden, director of Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens advocated planting street trees – uniform rows of one species. He recommended Moreton Bay figs be spaced at 30m intervals – far enough apart to avoid crowding as the trees grew but close enough so branches could interlock.
Famed specimens can be found in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. In the Sydney suburb of Randwick, the 150-year-old Tree of Knowledge was controversially cut down in 2016 to make way for light rail.
On the Gold Coast, a 90-year-old Moreton Bay fig planted at Tooloona Street, Tugun, by the site of the original Tugun Hotel, is listed by the National Trust.
. It is lit at night with fairylights and has been the centre piece of long table dinners staged under the stars. It also has featured in a Queensland Opera Company reboot of Italian opera Rigoletto, performed using the main street and buildings as a backdrop.
Cedar Grove’s new fig is but a sapling planted on land destined to become parklands and wildlife habitat that will buffer a soon-to-be-built waste water treatment plant. People from all over Logan visited to plant 2000 native trees and grasses on the site on the weekend.
They included four-year-old Liam Vaughn. Liam may grow up and move on from Logan, but there may come a day when he returns with a family of his own. He’ll take them to that tree, located in parklands and now fully grown and tell them how he helped his dad – their grandfather – plant it there. What will their reaction be? Awe and wonder, we suppose.