You’d be forgiven if you thought this huge boab tree (Adansonia gregorii) had lived in this spot overlooking Perth for many centuries.

In fact, it’s only resided in the Western Australian Botanic Garden since 2008. No, boabs aren’t super-fast growing trees. The tree is in fact 750 years old and began its life 3200 kilometres to the north in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. The tree had the misfortune of being right smack in the middle of the proposed Great Northern Highway. ‘No worries,’ said the folks at WA Botanic Garden. ‘We’ll re-plant it here.’ So they uprooted the 36-tonne tree and placed it on a truck for a six-day journey through the WA Outback. It was the longest land journey of a living tree of that size in history.

The tree suffered some physical damage during the trip and that led to some decay as you can see in the pock marks in my photo. But the arborists say the tree will recover from those injuries and is in fact very healthy and happy. Gija Jumulu will live on. Staff at the botanic garden have collected its seeds and have returned them to the Kimberley.

They call the tree ‘Gija Jumulu’ – Gija is the name of the indigenous people of the east Kimberly who gifted the tree to the people of Western Australia and ‘jumulu’ is their word for boab trees. This species of boab is endemic to Australia, most boababs come from Madagascar.

Gila Jumulu is still a youngster. Boabs are thought to live up to 2000 years so I suspect the tree will be overlooking Perth for a long time … unless of course the developers choose to pave paradise again.