for he could be seen from almost all over the island. Big Bob’s boughs, as big as trees themselves, were welcomed over my fences, and his roots went under the house, immense and muscular. I had refused to have them cut. The mystery of trees . . .
. . . Just beyond my boundary fence grew a prodigiously tall pine. The islanders round about called him Big Bob, and the name was warranted, for he could be seen from almost all over the island. Big Bob’s boughs, as big as trees themselves, were welcomed over my fences, and his roots went under the house, immense and muscular. I had refused to have them cut.
Suddenly, from the corner of my eye, I saw the tree explode. There is no other word for it. Big Bob swelled to half his size again, a colossal arrowhead of gold. Again and again these explosion occurred, each time to a lesser degree, and all the time the astonishing cloud of fine yellow pollen drifted down the tree to the ground.
That morning many things had come together, the degree of warmth in the air, the windlessness, the fertility of the trees two classes of cone – the small male and the large round female – and I had witnessed an apocalypse.
The islanders whose farmhouses were built along my road, each with a decent interval of eight or ten paddocks in between, told me that Big Bob had been there forever. Their great grandfathers had recalled him as a mature tree. So he might well have been the 250 years of age that, it is said, Norfolk Island pines can live. They also told me that the trees set cones only two or three times in twenty years, and these were not always fertile. . .
My workroom window looked out on Big Bob, and for several years I had watched his vast boughs gather in the dawn light, then the ruddy sunrise, until he looked as though he had secret fire in his heart, turning his whole being not red but bronze and amber.
We had been through a cyclone together, a time of tremendous noise, when the guava wastelands and the forest disappeared in the rain, blown into visibility by this gust and out by that, an illusory leafy city. The rain forest gave out immense vowel sounds, urrrrr, ahhhhhhhh! And the white oaks, natives related to the hibiscus, creaked and squealed, swirling and lashing, shedding seed capsules by the ton. But the pines, and most royally Big Bob, made small sedate arcs with their crests, and a slow swimming movement with the long boughs, like a host of sea anemones.
-Ruth Park
Kindred trees
The comforting old tallow-woods on the Casino Road on the way to Junction Hill.
The two frangipani trees near the courthouse; people forgetting their grown-up business for a moment to bend and pick up a flower and breathe in the perfume.
The modest and lovely little weeping figs beside the Clarence River at Corcoran Park
The short but feisty bottle tree in Alice St, near Victoria St
The shady world of the fig tree on the corner of Victoria Street and Villiers Street.
The enormous bluegums at Sheas Knob
The great brushbox giantess with breasts at Hortons Creek
The casuarina grove at Corcoran Park, soft and subtle.
A twisted arthritic old angophora at Kangaroo Creek