Photostory

The tree outside my windows is like a member of the family. It was a big, lush Silver Maple, almost brushing our windows with the tips of its branches until it was brutally pruned.

In my study on the ground level its canopy stretches above me, shading our building from the afternoon sun. On the middle floor, the tree filled the windows with green in Summer: cool and consoling with its clusters of serrated leaves fluttering in the gentlest breeze. When its leaves fall the bare criss-cross boughs at the top of the tree, visible from my bedroom window on the upper level, catch raindrops that hang glistening from its branches.

Living in the inner-city among tall buildings, this tree gives me constant connections with birds, weather and wind. I gazed at its leafy branches when we were isolated inside for days on end during the Covid pandemic; I saw the resident blackbird in the tree (and he saw me) early the following Spring when he returned with his lifelong wife. He looked in the window as I sat in bed drinking my morning cup of tea, as if checking to see if I was still there. Cat put her paws on the windowsill and I said ‘yes, here we are!’ Whenever there were babies in the house, they were positioned in front of the window to watch the shimmering, silver underside of the leaves, until they fell asleep.

Over the last few years the maple had developed quite a status in the street. As it matured, grew leafier and extended the delicate leaves at the ends of its boughs over the footpath, it was visited by more and more birds: the neighbourhood pair of rosellas, starlings with iridescent breast feathers; wagtails came searching for aphids and minuscule spiders, flocks of tiny silvereye arrived in the Autumn before their long flight across Bass Strait to winter in NSW. The silvereyes flit quickly from one leaf to another, feasting on seeds and sweet sap as the leaves turn golden.

Our maple was a magnificent tree: thirty years old, mature and confident.  It reminded me of trees in European cities, where they are allowed to grow large and spreading to fulfil the role they have had for centuries. Like the grove of plane trees in the grounds of the Lyceum in ancient Athens where Aristotle and Theophrastus, the ‘father of Botany’, walked.

Last January, at the height of its leafiness, the Silver Maple outside was radically pruned. ‘Savaged’, as one resident called it. No silvereyes came to feed this Autumn, and I wonder if I’ll live long enough to see its shape and leaf cover restored. Maple trees often lose sap, literally bleed, from wounds where saws have cut their wood. The arborists said they wanted to ‘make their pruning last’ and now I gaze at the many wounds on its trunk, slashed branches, radically thinned canopy and distorted profile. It is a tree that is flat on one side to accommodate the walls of our building. The man who requested the pruning lives in another suburb; he said it was the wrong kind of tree for the street and complained that it ‘blocked any view’.

The maple was my view.  Now all I see through its mutilated branches are the apartments opposite. I mourn for the vibrant, dignified tree that grew so close to my windows.