According to the plaque at its base (see photo) this Aleppo pine ‘descends from the original “Lone Pine” at Anzac', and was planted on 27 July 1957. As is well known from other entries in the New Zealand Tree Register (see CR/0961 and WGR/1944), and from Wilcox and Spencer’s botanical detective work [1], pre-2000 the vast majority of claimed descendants from the original Lone Pine were not actually grown from seed sourced from the Pinus brutia on Lone Pine ridge, Galipoli. As Wilcox and Spencer detail, Pinus halepensis is commonly called a ‘lone pine’ in Australian and New Zealand World War One commemorative sites, and other pines very different in appearance are also likewise named and linked to this story. This pine in the Ashburton First and Second World War memorial site is not a Pinus brutia, but P. halepensis. This does not stop it from functioning as a First World War memorial tree even if the botanical nomenclature following from the claim to be descended from the Lone Pine is not quite correct. It is a very healthy tree occupying a prominent place in the war memorial grounds (Lloyd, 2024).

Reference
1. Wilcox, M. & D. Spencer, 2007, ‘Stand up for the real Anzac lone pine of Gallipoli’, New Zealand Journal of Forestry, May: 3-9.