The entry to the Bay Beach at Cape Paterson is through a narrow tea tree path curving across the low dune backing the beach. This last summer, we have been taking a small step up the prostrate tea tree trunk lying across the path onto the sand banked up behind it. Almost twenty years ago we just had to duck under the leaning tree. Then, later, came the stage of adults clambering over and children wriggling under the barrier presented by the trunk. A few years later it became easy to just step over and now the trunk offers this barely noticeable step up. I wonder if by next summer it will be totally under the sand blown up through the tea tree tunnel by the winter Southerlies.
This single tea tree has reminded me of the reclining tea trees in the central plantation of Beaconsfield Parade between Port Melbourne and St Kilda. These are very old and thick trunked trees, blown by the South Westerlies into a permanent position of least resistance. Their grey, twisted, hairy barked trunks insist on doing what they want and I like to see them being so unstructured in what is essentially an urban landscape of cars, trucks and footpaths and buildings. It’s a reminder that just across the road is Port Phillip Bay. A bit further on is the Rip, Bass Strait and the Southern Ocean with its fierce Westerlies. All that pent-up wildness makes its mark on those trees.
And then I think of mulberry trees and their habit of gracefully lying down as they age. My childhood garden had a mulberry tree which reclined gently towards the side fence. Its wide trunk could be walked up half way, straddled like a very make-believe horse and was difficult to mow around. There was another mulberry tree near Bendigo in the paddocks on the Melbourne side of Big Hill. We would go there for Sunday afternoon picnics with Mum’s parents. They would park on the very wide roadside reserve, drink thermos tea and chat and doze in the late summer sun, while we kids raced across the paddocks, through fences to the dark green mounding mulberry colony. The thick rough leaves hid a green glowing climbing paradise of low trunk-bridges and sloping branches; all ours and completely private.
I’m remembering the absolute contrast of the mulberry trees on the lawns of Cliveden House (involved in the notorious Profumo affair) above the Thames in England. Again, I saw a family group of very old mulberry trees, this time reclining, not in dry paddocks near Bendigo, but on close cut lawns, surrounded by ancient walls, perennial borders, formal driveways and rose gardens. The National Trust had put up signs telling visitors that the trees are very old and politely asking the public to not climb them. This sign was being completely ignored by shouting children clambering over the unexpected climbing frame.
I like the way that these trees have decided not to stay vertical but have succumbed to the need to have a good lie down.
