Trees

Monday musings of Australian literature: National Tree Day

/ Whispering Gums / 31 Comments

Around ten years ago, I wrote a post on National Arbor Day. It was inspired by a Library of America story. The thing is that then I didn’t, and I still don’t hear, about Arbor Day anymore. Indeed, Mr Gums and I reminisced that it was mainly through school that we heard about it at all. Nor do I hear much about National Eucalypt Day, which I wrote about 8 years ago. I do hear sometimes about various tree-planting initiatives, but I was surprised to hear on ABC Classic FM on the weekend that Sunday was National Tree Day! A bit of research took me to the National Tree Day website.

Here, I learned that it was established in 1996, by Planet Ark, and that it has “grown into Australia’s largest community tree planting and nature care event”. The site continues that it is “a call to action for all Australians to get their hands dirty and give back to their community”.  I also learned that they run three tree days, whose dates for this year are:

  • Schools Tree Day Friday 25th July 2025 (set for the last Friday in July)
  • National Tree Day Sunday 27th July 2025 (set for the last Sunday in July)
  • Tropical Tree Day Sunday 7th December 2025

I said above that I don’t hear about Arbor Day anymore, so I checked Wikipedia. Under Australia, on the Arbor Day article, it says:

Arbor Day has been observed in Australia since the first event took place in Adelaide, South Australia on the 20th June 1889. National Schools Tree Day is held on the last Friday of July for schools and National Tree Day the last Sunday in July throughout Australia. Many states have Arbour Day, although Victoria has an Arbour Week, which was suggested by Premier Rupert (Dick) Hamer in the 1980s.

The implication is that it is still observed. It doesn’t, though, seem to get much publicity. I could research this, but so could you if you are interested! Meanwhile, I plan to use this post to share some tree quotes from Australian novels, and a couple of tree-inspired covers, as my little tribute to National Tree Day. 

My first quote is one I’ve shared before, because it’s my first memory of a tree playing a significant role in a novel. I’m referring to Ethel Turner’s children’s book, Seven little Australians (1894), and the death of our beloved Judy:

There was a tree falling, one of the great, gaunt, naked things that had been ringbarked long ago. All day it had swayed to and fro, rotten through and through; now there came up across the plain a puff of wind, and down it went before it. One wild ringing cry Judy gave, then she leaped across the ground, her arms outstretched to the little lad running with laughing eyes and lips straight to death.

This is realism. The tree has an important role to play in the plot. Another memorable novel featuring trees is Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus (1998). There is a narrative, of course, but it is framed around multiple species of gum trees, and opens with this:

We could begin with desertorum, common name hooked mallee … and anyway, the very word, desert-or-um, harks back to a stale version of the national landscape and from there in a more or less straight line onto the national character, all those linings of the soul and the larynx, which have their origin in the bush, so it is said, the poetic virtues (can you believe it?) of being belted about by droughts, bushfires, smelly sheep and so on; and let’s not forget the isolation …

As you can tell from the tone, the trees – although very real right down to their botanic descriptions – also set the novel’s tone and have something to say about Australian life and character.

More recent is Madelaine Dickie’s Red can origami (2019, my review). It is set in the Kimberley, but here is a description of a boab tree in Perth, a place where they don’t belong. It symbolises displacement:

The boab’s bark is cracked, its leaves are withered, and its roots strain from the soil, as if it’s planning on splitting town, hitching north.

There are more, but I’ll end with a writer who is loved for his landscape descriptions, Robbie Arnott. It’s hard to choose, but I’m going to use the one I used in my review of his novel, Limberlost, because it is a beautiful example of the landscape mirroring the emotions of the character moving through it. It occurs after a beautiful lovemaking scene:

Afterwards he’d driven them across the plateau through white-fingered fog, through ghostly stands of cider gums, through thick-needled pencil pines, through plains of button grass and tarns, through old rock and fresh lichen, until the road twisted and dived into a golden valley. Here at winter’s end, thousands of wattles had unfurled their gaudy colours. As they descended from the heights their vision was swarmed by the yellow fuzz. Every slope, every scree, every patch of forest, every glimpse through every window was a scene of flowering gold.

The book cover for this novel depicts what I assume is a stylised image of a Huon Pine with a boat, made by the protagonist using this wood.

Trees – or parts of trees, like branches or bark – often feature on book covers, because trees evoke so much in our consciousness. I guess they are easy to stimulate emotions in readers. They can be majestic and grand, or stark and threatening, or soft and sheltering – and suggest the associated feelings.

However, in doing a little research for this post, I stumbled across an old discussion about trees on book covers for crime novels. One was a 2007 blog post titled “Fright time in the forest”. The post broke down the four ways trees had been used on crime novel covers. There are those

  • used “more or less anthropomorphically–that is, as stand-ins for human-like monsters”
  • used “to establish a sense of desolation and bleakness, or mystery”
  • ominous-looking tree fronts, “on which the bark-encased stars loom belligerently overhead like villains preparing to fall upon and do violence to their victims”
  • used to “convey a mysterious atmosphere” through effects like fog, snow, a nighttime sky. 

Some of these overlap, I think, but I love the blogger’s conclusion, which suggests that

the designers of crime novels–like the storytellers who wanted to warn children off from wandering into the deep woods–have sought to associate trees with danger, disorientation, and despondency, all in the interests of book sales. One wonders whether this is healthy for the future of forests, a rapidly dwindling resource–or even healthy for the future of mankind, which might also become a dwindling resource.

I wonder whether book cover designers ever think of their larger responsibilities (besides garnering sales, I mean)!

I have strayed from where I started, which was to pay tribute to trees and share some favourite covers. However, this little discussion, which was picked up by England’s The Guardian was too interesting to ignore.

Any thoughts on trees in novels or on covers?

Australia’s first Arbor Day

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Frank Lloyd Wright tree quote
At the National Arboretum, Canberra

Do you ever wonder what a few generations hence will think about the way we do things? About how we put on our festivals and celebrations? Whether they will think how silly we look – and, I don’t mean “silly” in the ways we may have intended but “silly” in the sense of “cute” because, well, we just weren’t sophisticated like they are? I often do, and it came to mind again when I read last week about Australia’s first Arbor Day.

This post is a little out of the ordinary for me. It’s not (really) about a literary work and neither is it about a cultural event I’ve attended, but it is inspired by the Library of America story “About trees” that I reviewed last week. As I read that story, I was reminded of celebrating Arbor Day when I was young. So I did some research in the National Library of Australia’s Trove and discovered an article titled “Our first Arbor Day” in the South Australian Register of 20 June, 1889. What a little treasure it turned out to be!

First though, a brief history. While J Sterling Morton instigated Arbor Day in the USA, in Nebraska, in 1872, the first Arbor Day actually occurred, according to Wikipedia, in Spain in 1805 in a little village called Villanueva de la Sierra. It was the brainchild of a local priest who believed in “the importance of trees for health, hygiene, decoration, nature, environment and customs” (Naturalist Miguel Herrero Uceda). It came to Australia in 1889, though I was entertained to read in Prime Facts, published by the NSW Department of Primary Industry, that Australia’s first Arbor Day occurred 1890. Not so! That may have been the first in the east of the continent, but our first one did take place a year earlier.

The author of “Our first Arbor Day” tells us a bunch of interesting things about trees – about liberty trees and memorial trees in France and the USA, about the tree of knowledge and tree worship, and about the Town Clerk of London who created an avenue of trees in memory of the criminals “at whose executions he had assisted”! Our author continues that no encouragement to plant trees is needed in South Australia as:

The forestry influence is happily strong upon us in South Australia, and we are inclined to regard the man or boy [this is the nineteenth century I suppose!] who plants a tree in the light of a benefactor of the human race.

Good to hear! What’s interesting though is the type of trees named:

It would be a good thing to have the waste places of the colony covered with planes, or oaks, or pines, or whatever trees are best adapted to the condition of the case.

Hmm … it seems as though native trees weren’t considered as being “best adapted” for the place! Who said we were anglo-centric?

Our writer, like J. Sterling Morton, also recognises the relationship between trees and climate, stating that “the presence of trees tends to modify the climate”. S/he therefore approves of Arbor Day, and particularly of involving children, as it will “inculcate in them a conviction of the importance of the science of forestry.”

And this brings me back to the beginning of this post and, in fact, to the beginning of the article I’m discussing, because the article opens with a description of the tree planting ceremony in Adelaide. It went like this:

The Adelaide children start with a great flourish of trumpets from Victoria-square. Each school will be preceded by its band. The singers go before, the planters – who are to be decorated with rosettes – follow after. When the procession arrives on the ground the elect children, who are to plant trees, will be separated from their less favoured brethren. The schools will be divided into ‘squads’ — the planting squad and the non-planting squad. The planting squad is to be arranged with due care — one child to each hole. It may be hoped that a certain amount of fitness will be observed, and that every square hole will command the attendance of a square child. When the word is given, the trees will be planted, a great celebration will be over, and the children of the schools will have received a lesson on the value of arboriculture.

Can’t you just see it? The band, the singers and all those rosette-wearing, favoured, square children next to their square holes? The pride is palpable – just as we are proud today of our public events and ceremonies. Will we look as earnest and quaint to our descendants, do you think? Probably!

 

Whispering Gums on Deformed Pines

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Black Pine overhanging pond, Korakuen, Okayama

Black Pine over hanging pond, Korakuen, Okayama

I am slowly but surely working my way through Isabella Bird‘s Unbeaten tracks in Japan. While we were still in Japan, and enjoying its wonderful gardens, I came across the following passage from early in Bird’s travels:

After running cheerily for several miles my men bowled me into a tea-house, where they ate and smoked while I sat in the garden, which consisted of baked mud, smooth stepping-stones, a little pond with some goldfish, a deformed pine, and a stone lantern. (From Unbeaten tracks in Japan, 1880, Letter VI)

Hmm, I thought, was the pine really “deformed” or is this a case of Bird’s anglocentric eyes missing the beauty of Japanese pines? Because for me, besides of course the overall design, the three things I love about Japanese gardens are the stones, the lanterns and the pines. I cannot resist photographing these “objects”, particularly if I see them in combination. The stones, though, are stones, albeit beautifully chosen and carefully placed. And the lanterns – usually made of stone – come in a range of sizes and forms but are recognisably lanterns. The pines, however, are something else. They come in two main varieties – Red and Black. They are often supported by poles tied to the tree with rope, and their trunks may be protected by a bamboo “coat”. And, they are very particularly pruned, to shapes that I suppose could be described as “deformed” if you didn’t realise there was a plan and a purpose.

Korakuen scene, Okayama

Lantern, stones, pine and water at Korakuen, Okayama

Water, stones and pines are the critical elements of Japanese gardens. And each has its meaning. For now though I’ll just focus on the pine. Pines, we were told by our Korakuen guide, represent longevity. My research for this post confirmed this but added that they also express happiness. I suppose happiness goes with long life? (At least it would be nice to think so!). I also discovered that Japanese red and black pines represent in and yo, “the soft, tranquil female forces and the firm, active male forces in the universe” (From the UCLA Hannah Garden Center). I would have expected from this that red and black pines would usually be found (more or less) together in Japanese gardens, but while we certainly saw both types of pines I wasn’t aware of their being in any obvious relationship with each other or even of regularly being in the same garden. Perhaps I’m reading this symbolism a little too literally. I will do some more research on this one … but, if any of you readers out there are experts in Japanese pines I’d love to know more.

Alex Kerr, in his award-winning book Lost Japan, has some critical things to say about modern Japanese gardens, but as I haven’t finished that book  (either) I will reserve comments for now. Meanwhile, though, I hope you have enjoyed this admittedly little foray away from gums into the world of the Japanese pine!