The not so Lone Pine

[above] Veritable platoons of "Lone Pines" are raised at the Yarralumla nursery in Canberra

Incredibly there was a second pine cone that made its way back from the Gallipoli battlefront in Turkiye to Australia, this one sent by Lance Corporal Ben Smith to his mother back home at Inverell in northern NSW. His mother did not plant any seeds from the cone until 1928, thirteen years after the cone had arrived from Gallipoli. Mrs McMullen produced two seedlings from the cone, one was gifted to the town of Inverell (planted 1931) and the other to the "Department of the Interior" in Canberra. At the time this Department was charged with a range of functions, one of them being the management of The Australian War Memorial where the second seedling was planted in 1934 by the Duke of Gloucester. The Inverell tree died in 2007, but not before it was replaced with one of its offspring. The one planted at the Australian War Memorial in 1934 lives on there, but has also been replicated near by.

The tree at the War memorial in Canberra. The tree has suffered some storm damage and lost some branches since I took this photograph.

Seed collected from the Canberra tree has been used to produce many thousands of Lone Pines, thanks to the Yarralumla nursery in Canberra. These are distributed around the country each year and planted in ceremonies, with very many towns in Australia now featuring one or several Lone Pines.

A seed from the Canberra pine

The lone pine propagators are not the only ones that harvest the seeds, white cockatoos (corellas) are also regular visitors and also harvest the cones and seeds!

Pine cones discarded by the cockatoos litter the ground below the memorial tree

Interestingly the pines raised from the cone sent back by Ben Smith are not the same type of pines as that rasied from the cone collected by Sgt Thomas Keith McDowell, the latter produced Turkish Red Pines (Pinus brutia) and Smith's cone, Aleppo Pines (Pinus halepensis). Because the former is native to Gallipoli it is thought that the McDowell cone was quite likely from the original "lone pine" on the hill, while that of Smith possibly came from a Turkish trench where the Turks had been using pines brought in from nearby Syria to camouflage their diggings.

Most of the Lone Pines used as memorials around Australia originate from the Canberra War Memorial tree planted in 1934.

Labels at Yarralumla destined for the tree soldiers

[above] an entry in the seed registry at Yarralumla, recording the colleciton of seed from the memorial tree

Thus there is very much more than one lone pine story in Australia's war and recent history, and indeed there are definitely more than two. A couple more examples are given below.

Well the pictures were not very elegant but I hope you have enjoyed the stories associated with Australia's Lone Pine heritage.