Our front garden

Early settlers, New Zealand

The trees in our front garden are a delight, even when they shed their leaves willy-nilly and in great abundance in autumn. I began to wonder, as I gazed at them this morning, about the person who planted them; it must have been many years ago, 50 or 70, over 100 perhaps; I had no idea.

The house would have been smaller then, and it’s what I call a ‘bitsa’ now, as bits of this room and bits of another room have been added on over the years. We have photographs showing some of the stages, but not of the people who’ve lived here. I wonder did one of them plant the trees? If they did, what was there to see as they looked around them? Maybe the house was a farm cottage housing some of the workers, maybe our small rural farming community was just taking shape, and that made me wonder what other kind of trees were around at the time the native New Zealand bush was being cleared.

Then I remembered the stump of a huge tree in the back garden of the house; it was there when we moved to the house in 1982. There’s still a chunk or two left of the stump now. In one of the early photographs that we have discovered, taken at the front of the house, the branches of that tree can be clearly seen above the roof line, so it was certainly some tree.

So, what have these trees seen of the history around here, of Maori folk and early settlers, of peace and disharmony, of love and inter-racial marriage and bonding, of success and failure of early farming ventures? Inanimate they are presumed to be, but if they could speak, what a story of variety and surprise they would tell.

There was a popular song written quite a few years back now, about the idea of trees talking, in a derogatory manner as I recall:

‘Don’t you tell it to the trees
for they will tell the birds and bees,
and everyone will know
because you told the blabbering trees,
it’s no secret any more…’

Still, not all humans blabber and I think, neither would trees.

I think it’s rather good that people hug trees now, the special ones that are not chopped down. I haven’t hugged one yet, and we have some magnificent Kauri trees still standing here in New Zealand. So, maybe, 

one day, when there’s nobody else around…

Dennis Crompton © 1999
(first published www.denniscrompton.wordpress.com 2013)