The tree

There’s a tree in our backyard so huge I might as well say that we live under it. Its trunk is massive, but the crown is truly vast — at least the size of our house and probably bigger. We can pick it out from well beyond our property. It towers over the houses and the other trees in our street. It’s home to many creatures, in particular a family of possums, but also magpies, mudlarks, wattlebirds, cockatoos, galahs, lorikeets. When it flowers, the hum of bees is like a distant train. When the wind blows through it, it rains tiny pods on our roof and the sound is like a storm. I think of Larkin’s line:

Still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness…

The neighbours want it gone. It rains pods in their yards too, and threatens their fences. We looked at getting it removed. It is a liability, and we like to live at peace, as far as it depends on us, with the neighbours. But in this instance, it didn’t depend on us. Permission denied. It’s a ‘significant’ tree. More significantly, an arborist told us our tree — a sturdy, slow-growing yellowbox gum — is at least a hundred years old. ‘You’ve got to respect a tree like this,’ he said. His words stayed with me. They changed the way I saw the tree. Who was I — latecomer, flourishing and fading like grass — to wish it away? I began to respect it. To think about what has happened in its century of life. To look down at the mosaic of shadows by which our garden is transfigured. To look up in wonder at the spreading corona, the unresting castle, limbs outstretched to any passenger of the upper air. It is a significant tree. It’s absurd to call it ours, or even to say it’s in our garden. Our house was built, the garden laid out, when it was already 50 years old. It was already there when the roads and plots of our suburb were drawn up. Unless the laws change or it comes down in a storm (which the arborist thought unlikely) it will be there in another hundred years. We live, for a time, in its shadow. And then we’ll go.