The Giant Moreton Bay Fig

Near the train station downtown spreads a tree so enormous it stops travelers in their tracks. It is a Moreton Bay fig, a species native to Australia, and it is believed to be the largest of its kind in the United States. Its story is charmingly small in origin.

In eighteen seventy six, a visiting sailor gave a seedling from Moreton Bay, Australia, to a local girl, who planted it near State Street. After she moved away, a friend named Adeline Crabb transplanted the little sapling to this corner, on land then owned by the railroad. Nearly a century and a half later, that sapling has become a giant.

Its canopy spreads more than one hundred seventy feet across and casts shade wide enough, people like to say, to shelter a small crowd at midday. Its great gray roots buckle the ground around it like the coils of some sleeping creature. The city designated it a historic landmark in nineteen seventy, and it now sits on California's register of big trees.

For generations of arriving passengers, this astonishing tree, framed by the eucalyptus of the old station grounds, has been the first thing Santa Barbara shows them.