A giant boab tree thought to be up to 750 years old will be trucked 3,200km by road from Western Australia's remote Kimberley region to a new home in Perth's Kings Park.
The ancient tree - weighing 14 tonnes and with a trunk two-and-a-half metres wide - is being relocated after making way for a realignment of the Great Northern Highway at Warmun, 190km south of Kununurra.
The Gija traditional owners of the area decided to offer it to Perth's Kings Park, already a showpiece for native species, and will farewell it tomorrow.
The 14 metre high, bottle-shaped tree will travel on a 25 metre truck trailer, take up two traffic lanes and require police escorts before it is planted in Perth.
The transplantation will take place in the middle of Perth's winter, a climate foreign to the boab.
"What we're going to do is put in a very coarse type river soil to help the drainage in the winter," coordinator Patrick Courtney said.
"We'll add additional watering in the summer to mimic those (tropical) conditions in the north," he said.
The project is probably a world first for a mature tree, authorities say.
"Mature trees rarely become available so it is a real coup for the park," Mr Courtney said.
"We wouldn't be doing this if we thought it was a risky process. We've brought other boabs down and they've survived for up to 10 years and (are) still alive.
"We think that the knowledge that we've got from transplanting ... in the past that this had a great chance of surviving, as we would like it, for another 750 years."
Boab trees can live up to 2,000 years.