The Curious Case of the Monkey-Puzzle Tree

A couple of Decembers ago, in Paris, I paused to watch animatronic Christmas trees in the windows of Le Bon Marché. They were built as can-can dancers and ballerinas, and not so amusing as the young monkey-puzzle tree I had just noticed in an adjacent park. I’d only ever seen one in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

The forties movie has a young widow renting a cottage by the sea. It’s a cheap address because it’s haunted. But what really rankles her is in the front yard, blocking the view—an Araucaria araucana, planted by the ship captain who’d lived there. She wants roses, and the problem is that his spirit is intact and his love for that tree survived the death process, too. He seethes when she axes it: “What have you done with me monkey-puzzle tree!”

The Telegraph has branded the monkey-puzzle a “love-it-or-loathe-it tree.” Tony Kirkham, Head of the Arboretum, Gardens, and Horticultural Services at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew confirmed as much by phone: “Mhm. We call it the Marmite Tree.” Whether you go for the monkey-puzzle depends on how you feel about a Tim Burton cover of Dr. Seuss’s Truffula. Its spiraling leaves are as sharp as shivs, and some people effuse that the species is a “fantastic product.” “It’s one of those few trees that you can’t climb,” Kirkham noted. (You certainly cannot hug it.) He thinks the tree is grand, and when I mentioned monkey-puzzles to my friend Mitch Owens, AD’s decorative arts editor, Owens told me, “I adore them.” Others report back on the boughs as “savage curlicues,” “a nightmare to work in and around.” On a plant that can reach 160 feet and live 2,000 years, those branches hold forth like topiarian antenna, sending/receiving who knows what to/from who knows what galaxy. “I hate them,” the environmentalist Dick Warner wrote in his popular column, calling the monkey-puzzle “disturbingly extra-terrestrial” and “invariably ugly,” and encouraging his readers to make theirs into salad bowls. More neutrally, the Pacific Horticulture Society says that one makes a “weird statement in the landscape.”

Days after Christmas 2018, visiting Raleigh, folks were already chucking their pines, spruces, and firs to the curb when I caught a 3D short at the natural science museum about dinosaurs. Ankylosaurus clubbed a carnivore with its tail, and that was cool, but I leaned into the picture when the death antler foliage appeared onscreen. “Regarde, monkey-puzzles!” I whispered to my husband, who was puzzled by my fascination with the evergreen. But this is a tree you can’t unsee.

The monkey-puzzle’s roots go to the Jurassic. Some 200 million years ago, it...