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.