By the way, I highly recommend a visit to Parque Terra Nostra, a botanical garden near Furnas on San Miguel Island. The buildings here date to the 1700s, when Thomas Hickling, a wealthy Boston trader, built a home and introduced a number of trees and plants from North America. Subsequent generations of Azorean owners expanded the collection. In addition to a garden filled with endemic and native Azorean plants, there are beautiful plants and trees from other Mediterranean and semitropical areas of the globe, including trees from the Araucaria and Metrosideros genera, eucaplytus, redwoods, tree ferns, various palm species, and huge rhododendrons, magnolias, hydrangeas and camellias.
My favorite tree in the garden (and it was a surprise to see it) was a Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis). This is a tree botanists thought had been extinct for millions of years (they only knew it from fossil records) - until David Noble, an Australian hiker with some botanical knowledge, noticed some trees in a remote ravine in Wollemi Park, 200 miles from Sydney Australia. He brought some cuttings to scientists in Sydney, who concluded that Noble had discovered a “living fossil” - somehow, the 100 or so trees in that ravine had managed to survive - the last remaining specimens of their species. (Imagine if a hiker in a remote New Guinea valley had discovered a stegosaurus - it was like that for botanists.) Here’s a photo of me, next to the tree in the garden - not that it’s not very big, since no garden in the world has had one of these for more than 25 years!
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