trees in a Canberra parkland
Visiting friends in the East End of London recently we were sitting in the back garden of their house admiring two massive London plane trees. These trees were an astonishing 25, maybe 30, metres high, with extensive dark canopies and tall crowns billowing up into the sky. The back garden we were sitting in was one of many enclosed by the high rear walls of a continuous terrace of six-storey Victorian mansions. Each terrace's garden was about 12 metres wide by 30 metres long, back-to-back, creating a kind of giant open space separated only by the fences defining each property. Dominating all this were these two magnificent giants, standing a few gardens up from where we were but forming a green backdrop to everything in sight and to every backyard vista.
Since their heyday in the late nineteenth century, most of the surrounding buildings had been subdivided into independent flats, usually one per floor, so now there were six households for every original. All in all I calculated that the garden landscape, anchored by these two trees, was the visual resource, if not always the actual accessible garden, of more than 1,000 people.
Later I met the owner of the garden within which the two trees had been planted, who was, incidentally, an Australian. Their massive trunks and root systems had completely and overwhelmingly taken over, and every autumn a deep drift of wet and slimy leaves smothered all signs of life. Gone were his dreams of a veggie patch or even of a barbie for the prawns (perhaps that should be scampi) ...
The trees are protected and the owner is obliged to take care of them. But although he gets no official help or dispensation for being the manager for a visual and environmental resource for more than 1,000 people, his neighbours have come to his aid. They have banded together to help him with the cost of the arborist and the various tree doctors and surgeons necessary to ensure the continued health and happiness of these giants.
Furthermore, interlinking gates and paths have been provided so that he and his household can use neighbours' gardens at will whenever he wants to come out from under his green canopy and play. This community takes its big trees seriously. They are prepared to invest money and forgo some of their privacy and individual rights to ensure that the landscape that they all share and enjoy can be maintained.
There are two lessons I drew from this. One is that we need to find new ways to recognize and manage our own landscape resource, which exists independent of the fence lines and cadastral boundaries of property ownership. Our rural landscape is subdivided with scant reference to catchments, to landscape character areas, habitats or ecological zones. Similarly, much of our urban landscape is the legacy of past plantings or the control of private landholdings, always at risk of redevelopment or changing attitudes towards management. We need appropriate planning, economic and management mechanisms which look beyond cadastral boundaries to responsibly value and enhance our shared landscapes.
The second lesson for me was that here in Australia our own inheritance of big trees, many of which define our cities and suburbs, is in need of attention. As we consolidate and densify our urban and suburban areas, subdivide residential allotments and redevelop, we are rapidly losing this heritage of bunyas in Brisbane, of Sydney's suburban blue gums and of our big Australian figs. We also need to identify how we can leave a legacy for the future in an era of decreasing garden size and increasing house footprint. Where can we plant big trees so they can thrive for hundreds of years?
It's about time we took our own big trees more seriously. We need to firstly identify the resource, then develop comprehensive stewardship and management programs. We need to recognize and promote their real value. The February 2006 issue of Landscape Australia contained a report of the Sydney Tree Management Forum, and recommended we get behind drafting a national charter. This is a great initiative and I think long overdue. We've been borrowing the landscape for a long time. It's time we thought about paying some of it back.
Mark Fuller, AILA National President 200-2007
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