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How a forgotten willow branch, planted to keep sheep in line, became one of the most photographed trees on the planet.
Sometime around 1939, a fence was built along the shoreline of Roys Bay to stop stock from Wānaka Station wandering further along the lake edge. Whoever built it used what was on hand, including a sturdy branch cut from a nearby willow as one of the posts. Willows being willows, that branch had other ideas. Instead of simply rotting in place like a fence post should, it took root in the sandy lakebed and started growing — a stubborn, half-submerged crack willow that nobody planted on purpose and nobody expected to last.
For most of its life, the tree was just a curiosity locals walked past — stunted and a little strange-looking thanks to its permanently waterlogged roots, its visible height rising and falling with the lake level, sometimes bare in winter and looking almost sculptural against the mountains behind it. It survived unnoticed for the better part of eight decades, which, for a tree standing alone in open water, is no small thing.
Nobody planted it on purpose. Nobody expected it to become the most photographed tree in the country.
Its fame arrived almost all at once. In 2014, Christchurch photographer Dennis Radermacher went out hoping to catch the tree at sunrise, only to find it wrapped in mist instead. He took the photo anyway — cormorants resting in its bare branches, the mountains barely visible through the fog — and it went on to win the 2014 New Zealand Geographic Photograph of the Year. From there, the image spread the way these things do: amateur photographers started making the short walk out to it themselves, tagging their shots #ThatWānakaTree, and the hashtag snowballed into the tens of thousands.
Being New Zealand's most photographed tree hasn't been entirely kind to it. In 2017, a branch broke off after tourists climbed it for photos, prompting signage asking visitors to admire it from a distance. In March 2020, someone deliberately sawed off several of its larger limbs overnight, including the low branch that used to trail out over the water — an act that upset locals and visitors alike and made international news. The tree has recovered since, but both incidents are a reminder that its fame rests on people treating it gently.
Today the willow remains one of the most reliable photo stops in the region — a short walk from the Wānaka Watersports carpark, best visited early or late in the day when the light and the crowds both cooperate. It's a strange kind of fame for a tree that started life as scrap timber, but there's something fitting about it too: in a town built around a lake, the most photographed thing in Wānaka turned out to be something the lake itself decided to keep.
Our boats leave from the marina right along the same shoreline — see our lake tours for details.
