CELEBRATION OF TREES

Do you have a poem to share, or a story or just a few words to celebrate the mystery of trees? Leave your offerings at the CEC office, in the newsletter pigeonhole. ‘Bonsai’ and ‘About My Favourite Tree’ are gifts to the Clarence Valley from Bett Taylor and Beryl Peake, two of the women who did the Artsfest Creative Writing course this year.

Thanks Bett and Beryl.

‘Trees are as much cultural beings as they are botanical specimens or timber. The tree is a powerful symbolic creature, as well as being a mysterious and miraculous one, hence its use and reuse to help us explain ourselves in the world . . . . Common Ground is working with and through the power of ideas, exploring philosophies which intertwine interests in nature, culture and place with poetry. The arts can help us turn our complacent view of ordinary life upside down, can help to bring us back from abstraction, help us to reinvent, to reinterpret and to involve. We must draw in the folk who have not the slightest interest in ecologically sustainable futures, who are overwhelmed by the global, bowed by the burden of history, feeling disempowered and disenfranchised by the experts. But starting small and local may help to build what democracy could and should be about. We need to create a culture of wanting to care. Only then shall we know sustainability.’

-Sue Clifford, Common Ground, UK. www.commonground.org.uk

Bonsai

I walk past it now, white smooth branches, dark green leaves, thick and long, big and separate. I look at it happy now by the little reeded creek and it says to me thank you. I know its roots stretch and grow, intertwine and drink. I smile and know it will be big enough one day for me to sit under and if not me, someone else, children to climb, birds to nest. What could I say but thank you when the bonsai fig was given as a birthday present. O Happy Sixtieth the card said and the tree sat already 30cm high in a small shallow pot 15 cm across and 5 cm deep, mounded with moss, its branches tortured to an accepted man made wired shape. Thank you I said again, embarrassed that someone who knew me so well would think I could find joy in the crippled sadness. I watered the mound, like a wound on a leg, trying to make up for every other sense it would never know. Most of the leaves fell off from overwatering and only three remained, yellow ad limp. I learned that the gift giver had moved to the city with its limitless space and confines, security of four walls and people surrounds. Now was my chance. Come on you Darling tree, with me you go to the paddock of my dreams! No more your tiny feet, china-toed and crippled. I walk past it now, white smooth branches, dark green leaves, thick and long, big and separate and I just smile and wink and say and thank-you too.

-Bett Taylor

About My Favourite Tree

When I think about it, I don’t really have a favourite tree - Just like all trees in general. But I remember being a child and appreciating autumn leaves. When I was about five years old I dreamed I would be an artist living in a small cottage surrounded by deciduous trees. There would be a peculiar carpet of orangey reds, brownish oranges and subdued pinkish reds, plane tree leaves among them, surrounding my cottage. Cubby houses were special back then and at a small one teacher school at Leigh there were trees with straight branches and when in kindergarten I was amazed at what the sixth class kids did with them to make the most amazing cubby house I’ve ever seen. It was. The straight sticks were stuck straight into the ground to make a vertically arranged log cabin. Somehow they managed to organise sticks to make a pitched roof too. The sticks must have been tied together with string. Inside were two bench style seats on either side of the entrance and joined into the back and front wall. It was somehow amazing to sit in our log cabin made by children. I felt I had helped create it and I think I did. The deciduous have such a presence in autumn that say ‘All is passing, enjoy the season.’ The rainforest trees, though some are majestic, are for a time upstaged. The curtain is up when the plane tree and the liquid amber are naked, for the strangler fig to assert himself under the canopy, and the birds, like Persephone in the underworld make their calls deepened in the cavern-like spaces. I remember the battles with conkers in the school grounds but now the plane tree seeds are props for the butcher bird’s rendition and the magpies and the currawongs in their dinner suits attend. After further consideration I think the plane tree could be my favourite tree although the strangler fig that shelters the native violet and the bleeding heart wins second prize. And what about the peach trees and the lemon?

-Beryl Peake

White fig

Paul and I rested on its roots one afternoon on the hot walk to town. Paul lay in an elegant curl, propped on his elbow. I chose one with a broad back, a chaise lounge curving from head to heels. I loved the idea of introducing my brother to this tree, and them getting along so famously. Little Ravi poked about in the dry leaves and climbed over the smaller snaky roots while the old tree spread itself out graciously, entering into the spirit of things. During the dry September, I noticed it was getting a gaunt look. The leaves were sparser and you could see more of the branches which used to be hidden. It was as if it had lost weight somehow. The roots clutched the ground like claws, waiting for rain.

-Claire