Trees here and there

There may be nothing new under the sun, but rediscovery is fun - like certain people who at an advanced age suddenly put on green goggles, for example, and review the world from a different perspective. And why not? What my aged Aunt Helen with a wicked gleam in her eye used to call her delayed maturation.

A beautiful Christmas present book about trees reminds me how marvellous these great stalky creations are. The Kimberley has its share of odd ones, from these tall palm and grass tress that manage to grow right up in the rock crevices, to the boab, or baobab, or just upside down tree. A famous, now infamous, very old and fat boab tree in the Kimberley was used for many years as a prison cell. By way of contrast, the tall columns in the Eglise des Jacobins in Toulouse are supposed to have been inspired by the spreading palm.

The Wisteria is hardly a tree at all - but it tries pretty hard sometimes. This one is at an historic homestead called 'Micalago', past Michelago off the Cooma Road. It was built in the mid 1830s, this verandah being of the 'great room' added in 1880 or so. Later, painter George Lambert (born St Petersburg 1873, moving to Australia when he was 14) came to work here, completing his portrait  'The Squatter's Daughter' at Micalago in 1923. [The blue shutters are rather reminiscent of the favoured colours for the volets in Provence in the south of France - the Continental influence?]

Meanwhile back at the ranch, another Continental touch, the lovely birch tree, attracts some very un-European birds. Crimson rosellas apparently rather like the catkins that grow here early in the summer and are often to be seen enjoying the pickings in our front garden. 

Readers based in Europe will seldom see such a colourful sight, although it must be admitted that your favoured photographic records probably include marvelous ancient trees that are a hundred or so times the age of these young saplings. Many of these are of course the ubiquitous plane tree. Seemed like a good idea at the time to line those French country roads with them but cars got bigger and faster and the gaps didn't.

And finally, where would you keen photographers be without that overhanging tree, its type or name ignored as irrelevant but whose hanging foliage provides just the compositional addition - just the frame or line you need - to set up your award-winning photograph perfectly?

[Sunken punt hulls at Isles-sur-la-Sorgue. Don't know about the tree.]