Coordinates: 34°24′50″N 119°41′39″W / 34.4138°N 119.6942°W / 34.4138; -119.6942
Santa Barbara's Moreton Bay Fig Tree located in Santa Barbara, California is believed to be the largest Ficus macrophylla in the country.
A seaman, visiting Santa Barbara In 1876, presented a seedling of an Australian Moreton Bay Fig tree to a local girl who planted it at 201 State Street. After the girl moved away a year later, her girlfriend, Adeline Crabb, transplanted the tree to the corner of Montecito and Chapala streets on land then owned by the Southern Pacific Transportation Company. The tree was officially designated as a historic landmark in 1970, and the property was deeded to the City of Santa Barbara in 1976. The tree has since been placed on the California Register of Big Trees.
In July 1997 the circumference of the tree at 4-1/2 feet above ground was 498 inches (41-1/2 feet). The average crown spread was 176 feet and the total height was 80 feet. Measured in 2010, the widest spread of the branches is 198 feet (60 m). The trunk diameter above the buttress roots is 12.5 feet.
Famous quotes containing the words bay, fig and/or tree:
“A great work by an Englishman is like a great battle won by England. It is an unfading bay tree.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“A fig for
The seal of fire,
Death hairy-heeled, and the tapped ghost in wood,
We make me mystic as the arm of air,
The two-a-vein, the foreskin, and the cloud.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“Books, gentlemen, are a species of men, and introduced to them you circulate in the “very best society” that this world can furnish, without the intolerable infliction of “dressing” to go into it. In your shabbiest coat and cosiest slippers you may socially chat even with the fastidious Earl of Chesterfield, and lounging under a tree enjoy the divinest intimacy with my late lord of Verulam.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)