Friday open thread: meaningful trees
Sep. 20th, 2024 05:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12This week's open thread prompt is sparked by the sad news that, when I was walking to the pool, I realised that the council had cut down my favourite tree in Ely! I love trees: they're one of my favourite things to look at and photograph, and I get very attached to them. They're like familiar old friends, and they're one of the first things I notice when I'm in a new place.
So: talk to me about the trees that have meant the most to you.
To start things off, here's one more photo of the tree I began this post lamenting. Of course, I also love the fruit trees in our garden: two white cherry trees, two pear trees (different varieties), a bramley apple tree, and two quince bushes whose fruit never ripens enough to eat.
Although I dearly loved it, I seem to have only taken a single photo of my favourite tree in Cambridge, a squat, sprawling thing with branches that arched over your head, close to the ground, like a hug. Its branches are so densely packed together that in summer, when its leaves are green, you can barely see the sky between them. It made me feel happy whenever I walked past, which was frequent.
Back in Sydney, it's hard to go past a good Moreton Bay fig tree — which line the parks and streets in the area where my family lives, and provide sustenance to birds, possums, and vast colonies of fruit bats — but my favourite tree is something more nostalgic: the giant eucalypt that grew next to my maternal grandparents' house. At some point before I was born, my grandfather built a bird-feeder (a flat platform on which he would scatter seeds and multiple birds would stand) which — because the land on which the house was built sloped, so that half of the house jutted out like a ship's prow at a height one storey above the ground below it — was in the eyeline of anyone gathered at their house for a meal, either outside on the deck, or inside in the dining room. The birds — rosellas, rainbow lorikeets, gang gangs, galahs, Australian magpies, currawongs, and raucous sulfur-crested cockatoos — would descend, all with very distinct personalities, and we'd watch, entranced.
But really, the trees that mean the most to me are the ones that formed the fabric of my universe when I was growing up in Canberra. We lived in three different houses during this fifteen-year period, all with massive gardens. The first house — the rental place my parents moved into with three-year-old me, where they lived when my sister was born — had a plethora of trees. There were the magnolia trees near the front porch, which my sister and I would climb into from the porch wall, and spend hours chatting. There was the dogwood tree near the front fence, which we would climb and watch the world go by, keeping a written log of everyone who parked in the street and walked past (we fancied ourselves spies, but no one did anything more exciting than get in and out of a car, ride a bike, or walk a dog). And there was the beautiful liquid amber tree out in the back garden, whose lowest branch was too high for me to get to without standing on a wooden crate, and whose autumn leaves were so lovely that my sister and I would gather them up to dry between the pages of heavy books.
We moved when I was nine into the house my parents bought, whose garden seemed as palatial as that of a stately home. It had a vegetable patch, grape and kiwi fruit vines, a herb garden that my dad and paternal grandfather built, two apple trees, two pear trees, a plum tree, and a greengage tree. But my absolute favourites were the apricot tree at the back fence, which had a broad, horizontal branch just above my head height, onto which I would climb, and sit for hours, writing in my diary, and the two Japanese maple trees, which were planted close to one another. My sister and I declared that one was 'her' tree and one was 'mine,' and we spent hours in them, talking, and making up imaginative games (we inhabited a series of different invented worlds and characters — all my creation, completely made up with no reference to any existing work of fiction — which we dipped in and out of for most of our shared childhood, picking up wherever we left off, for years). Sometimes my parents would tie a hammock between these two trees, but for the most part, they were my sister's and my domain.
After my parents separated, my mother, sister and I moved into our final house in Canberra, but although it was surrounded by a verdant garden, I never really felt as intensely about the trees there as I had in the previous two houses. However, there was one final batch of meaningful trees in my childhood: those in the playground of my primary school.
Australian schools — particularly in Canberra — tend to be on absolutely massive blocks of land by European standards, and my (state) primary school was no different. And one of the features of the endless expanses of playground were huge thickets of various types of trees: there were patches of native eucalyptus trees, multiple weeping willows (whose branches my friends and I used to plait and weave into baskets), and other clusters of deciduous European trees whose groups of spreading trunks formed little circular areas within which we would hang out, feeling as if were were in our own enclosed world. But the true arboreal pinnacle of my primary school was the veritable forest of ornamental plum trees growing on one side of the play equipment. At one point when I was seven years old, my friends and I had a long-running game (which we'd pick up from where we left off every lunch and recess) in which the play equipment was a space station, and each different tree was a planet in our solar system or some other celestial body, and we were all moons and comets, drifting around to visit these various things. (We even picked a tree that had had one branch sawn off — leaving an oval-shaped smoothe plane — to be Jupiter, and we'd rub the ornamental plums in this sawn-off area in order to stain it red like Jupiter's red spot. Such was our attention to detail.) But the other key feature of these trees was that a) their fruit was delicious (it was 'ornamental,' but you could eat it, if bitter, hard, plum-type things the size of cherries appealed, which to me and all the kids in my primary school, they definitely did) and b) we were forbidden by our teachers from climbing them. Of course, the combination of forbidden fruit and forbidden trees was like catnip to all of us, and a large portion of my primary school lunchtimes were spent sneaking up these trees and gorging myself on the fruit. By the time I was in the final year of primary school, we had a whole system in place: younger children to act as lookouts and warn us if teachers on playground duty were heading our way, empty lunchboxes deployed as receptacles for the plums (which were handed out surruptitiously like sweet treats in the classroom), and hours spent stuffing our faces with all the fruit. (All this was only possible because, as I said, the school playground was enormous, and yet for some reason they only ever deployed two teachers at a time to watch us — and quite honestly the amount of dangerous stuff we did without anyone being aware of it would fill another 1000+ words of Dreamwidth post.) I loved those trees so much! I wonder if I'd still like the taste of the ornamental plums these days, though.
So: talk to me about the trees that have meant the most to you.
To start things off, here's one more photo of the tree I began this post lamenting. Of course, I also love the fruit trees in our garden: two white cherry trees, two pear trees (different varieties), a bramley apple tree, and two quince bushes whose fruit never ripens enough to eat.
Although I dearly loved it, I seem to have only taken a single photo of my favourite tree in Cambridge, a squat, sprawling thing with branches that arched over your head, close to the ground, like a hug. Its branches are so densely packed together that in summer, when its leaves are green, you can barely see the sky between them. It made me feel happy whenever I walked past, which was frequent.
Back in Sydney, it's hard to go past a good Moreton Bay fig tree — which line the parks and streets in the area where my family lives, and provide sustenance to birds, possums, and vast colonies of fruit bats — but my favourite tree is something more nostalgic: the giant eucalypt that grew next to my maternal grandparents' house. At some point before I was born, my grandfather built a bird-feeder (a flat platform on which he would scatter seeds and multiple birds would stand) which — because the land on which the house was built sloped, so that half of the house jutted out like a ship's prow at a height one storey above the ground below it — was in the eyeline of anyone gathered at their house for a meal, either outside on the deck, or inside in the dining room. The birds — rosellas, rainbow lorikeets, gang gangs, galahs, Australian magpies, currawongs, and raucous sulfur-crested cockatoos — would descend, all with very distinct personalities, and we'd watch, entranced.
But really, the trees that mean the most to me are the ones that formed the fabric of my universe when I was growing up in Canberra. We lived in three different houses during this fifteen-year period, all with massive gardens. The first house — the rental place my parents moved into with three-year-old me, where they lived when my sister was born — had a plethora of trees. There were the magnolia trees near the front porch, which my sister and I would climb into from the porch wall, and spend hours chatting. There was the dogwood tree near the front fence, which we would climb and watch the world go by, keeping a written log of everyone who parked in the street and walked past (we fancied ourselves spies, but no one did anything more exciting than get in and out of a car, ride a bike, or walk a dog). And there was the beautiful liquid amber tree out in the back garden, whose lowest branch was too high for me to get to without standing on a wooden crate, and whose autumn leaves were so lovely that my sister and I would gather them up to dry between the pages of heavy books.
We moved when I was nine into the house my parents bought, whose garden seemed as palatial as that of a stately home. It had a vegetable patch, grape and kiwi fruit vines, a herb garden that my dad and paternal grandfather built, two apple trees, two pear trees, a plum tree, and a greengage tree. But my absolute favourites were the apricot tree at the back fence, which had a broad, horizontal branch just above my head height, onto which I would climb, and sit for hours, writing in my diary, and the two Japanese maple trees, which were planted close to one another. My sister and I declared that one was 'her' tree and one was 'mine,' and we spent hours in them, talking, and making up imaginative games (we inhabited a series of different invented worlds and characters — all my creation, completely made up with no reference to any existing work of fiction — which we dipped in and out of for most of our shared childhood, picking up wherever we left off, for years). Sometimes my parents would tie a hammock between these two trees, but for the most part, they were my sister's and my domain.
After my parents separated, my mother, sister and I moved into our final house in Canberra, but although it was surrounded by a verdant garden, I never really felt as intensely about the trees there as I had in the previous two houses. However, there was one final batch of meaningful trees in my childhood: those in the playground of my primary school.
Australian schools — particularly in Canberra — tend to be on absolutely massive blocks of land by European standards, and my (state) primary school was no different. And one of the features of the endless expanses of playground were huge thickets of various types of trees: there were patches of native eucalyptus trees, multiple weeping willows (whose branches my friends and I used to plait and weave into baskets), and other clusters of deciduous European trees whose groups of spreading trunks formed little circular areas within which we would hang out, feeling as if were were in our own enclosed world. But the true arboreal pinnacle of my primary school was the veritable forest of ornamental plum trees growing on one side of the play equipment. At one point when I was seven years old, my friends and I had a long-running game (which we'd pick up from where we left off every lunch and recess) in which the play equipment was a space station, and each different tree was a planet in our solar system or some other celestial body, and we were all moons and comets, drifting around to visit these various things. (We even picked a tree that had had one branch sawn off — leaving an oval-shaped smoothe plane — to be Jupiter, and we'd rub the ornamental plums in this sawn-off area in order to stain it red like Jupiter's red spot. Such was our attention to detail.) But the other key feature of these trees was that a) their fruit was delicious (it was 'ornamental,' but you could eat it, if bitter, hard, plum-type things the size of cherries appealed, which to me and all the kids in my primary school, they definitely did) and b) we were forbidden by our teachers from climbing them. Of course, the combination of forbidden fruit and forbidden trees was like catnip to all of us, and a large portion of my primary school lunchtimes were spent sneaking up these trees and gorging myself on the fruit. By the time I was in the final year of primary school, we had a whole system in place: younger children to act as lookouts and warn us if teachers on playground duty were heading our way, empty lunchboxes deployed as receptacles for the plums (which were handed out surruptitiously like sweet treats in the classroom), and hours spent stuffing our faces with all the fruit. (All this was only possible because, as I said, the school playground was enormous, and yet for some reason they only ever deployed two teachers at a time to watch us — and quite honestly the amount of dangerous stuff we did without anyone being aware of it would fill another 1000+ words of Dreamwidth post.) I loved those trees so much! I wonder if I'd still like the taste of the ornamental plums these days, though.
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Date: 2024-09-20 05:25 pm (UTC)My husband is really the one who loves trees, and what I love about them is how happy they make him. He loves to find interesting and really old trees in all the places we travel. Probably my favourite, and certainly one of his, is the Cedar of Lebanon in the Jardin des Plantes.
I see very few distinctive trees in my daily life, though there's lots of them in the park. I can't think of one that sticks out to me, but I love them collectively.
Oh, I also wanted to add - I have a friend in Sydney who's currently seeing red over their Moreton fig, so it amused me to see you mention them. Apparently the bird and bat poop situation is getting out of hand.
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Date: 2024-09-20 06:43 pm (UTC)That Cedar of Lebanon is really spectacular!
I have a friend in Sydney who's currently seeing red over their Moreton fig, so it amused me to see you mention them. Apparently the bird and bat poop situation is getting out of hand.
Oh no, your poor friend! Yes, Moreton Bay fig trees are stunningly beautiful — and you should never have one in your garden, nor (if you have a car) park underneath it, because everything underneath it will become literally covered in shit in a very short period of time. I admire them from afar!
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Date: 2024-09-22 04:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-09-22 05:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-09-20 05:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-09-20 06:49 pm (UTC)Your garden and tree-planting activities sound lovely, as does the cedar tree.
It feels like a losing battle, but we must keep planting!
Absolutely!
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Date: 2024-09-20 09:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-09-21 01:27 pm (UTC)The council have put another tree where it was, as well they might, and I see it and think: you are pretty, but you won't grow to the same size in my lifetime. It's a weirdly existential thought to have every day on your way out the house.
I can relate!
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Date: 2024-09-21 02:08 am (UTC)I grew up in a house with an enormous valley oak (Quercus lobata) in the back garden. I mean enormous; it was much taller than our two-story house, and easily 2 meters in diameter. The crown covered almost the entire back garden in its shade. The tree doctor we had out one year when the red cone gall wasps were getting a bit much said it was ~300 years old, possibly older -- and it could go on living for another couple centuries! and My bedroom looked right out on it where the biggest branches (each of which could have been its own respectable tree) forked out of the trunk. Like most oaks, it was twisty and knobby and moss-covered, so I came to know many pareidolian characters-- the shapely lady who flung her arms out from the left, the two bulbous-nosed gentlemen who looked rightwards towards our neighbors, the Disembodied Butt and Legs. The acorn woodpeckers loved it, as did the western gray squirrels, and of course, I did too! When my parents finally moved just a couple years ago, they only let people bid on the house who had promised never to cut it down (except in cases of danger).
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Date: 2024-09-21 01:28 pm (UTC)I love everything about this!
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Date: 2024-09-21 06:43 pm (UTC)Here's an iconic photo of it bare. It looks like it can't possibly be alive, but would burst into green in spring, which always felt like a kind of magic.
This was the first and most enduring thing I loved on the UC Berkeley campus (I saw it bare and rather sinister in the fall, and dubbed it Old Man Willow before learning what species it really was), and there are pictures of me communing with it my freshman year, and then visiting again with my kids.
More impressively, though, here it is featured as the Tree of Wisdom -- with UCB's Nobel Laureates arranged around it :)
(A couple of years ago I wrote a poem about it, which was published in a magazine devoted to trees, along with a photo of the tree, which made me very happy.)
Really enjoyed meeting your favorite trees via this post and the photos. Very jealous of trees with possums and fruit bats! Weirdly, eucalyptus are also nostalgic for me. They were planted all over San Francisco by early settlers -- I heard this was done because they grow fast and they wanted a fast local source of timber... but the wood is actually bad for that, so they just ended up growing here. I'd never seen them growing wild before (possibly had never seen them at all) before emigrating here, and everything about them -- the leaves, the little caps, the fuzzy flowers, the bark -- was so neat, in a way that went from alien to familiar, and now I associate them very strongly with San Francisco and especially my first memories of it.
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Date: 2024-09-22 10:58 am (UTC)I had no idea about the eucalyptus trees in San Francisco! Having grown up in Australia, to me they're just a default kind of background tree — the smell, the look, and the feel of their bark and leaves is so ubiquitous, although of course I've now lived in Europe for fifteen years, so I always have to adjust back to eucalypts when I visit Australia, after spending so much time surrounded by leafier, greener, wetter deciduous trees.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-22 04:31 pm (UTC)When I was about nine years old we moved to a small town called Hatfield. In the middle of the town we had Hatfield Park which dated back to the 16th century (or earlier), and had a lot of very old oak trees. Some of these were easy for kids to climb and also hollow. Before this I had read about hollow trees in children's books, and oh! the sheer romance & excitment of having a hollow tree where I myself could climb up & get down into the hollow trunk at the centre. It was amazing. I fantasied about running away from home and living in the tree.
And right now I live in an upstairs flat, but there's a scots pine in my neighbour's garden and the top of the tree is level with our windows. It's beautiful, I look at it every day and I love it.
This is such a great question - I'm probably going to post about trees in my own journal at some point because many more I want to remember.
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Date: 2024-09-22 05:25 pm (UTC)I love everything about this! It sounds so idyllic, like something from a children's adventure story!
I love living at tree height in flats. My mum's flat (where I lived for four years during undergrad and then another nine months before I moved to the UK) is on the sixth floor, and its front windows are at the height of the plane trees that line her street. When the trees have leaves, it's like looking out into a swaying sea of green. Your scots pine sounds similiarly delightful.
I look forward to reading about trees in your journal, and I'm glad you liked the prompting question.