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For 27 years, a huge dense-canopied Harpephyllum caffrum, a South African Wild Plum (or a tree with a ridiculous number of leaves that always landed in my backyard), stood on the pavement outside my house.
It was, by any measure, just a very, very old and elegant tree, owned by the city long before I arrived, so technically it’s not mine.
It gave my house shade, a canopy and some dappled ambience. Turns out it was also propping up something I hadn’t clocked until now: a sense of home.
I want to be clear that I did not think of this tree often. I did not hug it. I did not know its Latin name until council’s notice arrived and informed me of it, almost as an afterthought, the way you may meet a friend’s family at their funeral.
A few weeks ago, council decided that my tree was in poor health and, this week, the tree-people took a buzzy chainsaw to it. What’s left is a stump the size of a small car, awaiting its own removal. Soon there’ll be a large hole where a tree used to be. I didn’t expect to feel much about this at all, but I was wrong.
I’ve been surprisingly, almost embarrassingly, emotional about a piece of municipal vegetation, which made me wonder what exactly I was mourning – because it clearly wasn’t just the tree.
Here’s the thing about living somewhere for nearly three decades: you stop seeing the furniture. Not the furniture inside – the furniture of your life outside the front door. The tree wasn’t something I admired each morning like a tourist snapping a photo. It was just there, the way your own reflection is just there. It filtered the light through my windows and into my backyard at a particular hour. It made a particular sound when the wind picked up. I walked past it and its gigantic root system thousands of times without registering it every time. Possums loved it. Birds chirped from it, and they made it their home too.
You don’t notice the things that are most obvious in your life until they’re gone. My eye keeps going up to where the canopy was and finding brilliant blue sky instead, which is its own small, repeated joy and a jolt. My brain is expecting one thing and getting another, several times a day, apparently indefinitely.
Scout, my dog, went out to the backyard and just kept barking and barking at the blue sky where my tree used to be. What was that about? I think even little Scout was feeling the loss, a bit like a member of the family having departed.
Then there’s the small matter of nobody asking me. I understand councils have arborists and liability concerns and a job to do. But there’s something particular about having a piece of your daily landscape removed by a decision made entirely without you, on a timeline entirely without you, for reasons you’re simply informed of just days before the fact.
It’s not that I think I should’ve had a vote – who am I to argue with an arborist? It’s that grief plus powerlessness is a far more potent cocktail than grief alone.
I’m aware this is, in the scheme of life, a very, very minor tragedy. Nobody is sending casseroles or hosting a celebration of life for a stump. Nobody should. I am not asking for sympathy cards or flowers addressed to a tree.
But I’d argue that the loss of a tree that has quietly witnessed 27 years of your life – the comings, the at times sad goings, the baby, the teenager, the BBQs, the excited version of you that moved in and every kooky version since – is not nothing.
It’s a legitimate loss, even if the only appropriate way to grieve it is privately and slightly self-consciously, while explaining to bemused friends and family that yes, I am fine at the moment. I’m just very sad about a tree.
I’m told the stump goes next week. I’m also told a Weeping Lilly Pilly (Waterhousea floribunda) will be planted in its place.
It’s a native evergreen that will, eventually, grow to provide a similar canopy.
I will, presumably, not live long enough to sit under its major shade myself. But that’ll be a separate piece of grief for another day.
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