Plane Trees
BY ANDREW WOODHOUSE
President, Potts Point and Kings Cross Heritage and Residents’ Society
“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The next best time is now” – Chinese proverb.
A-CHOO. Excuse me. My doctor says I have occasional sneezing caused by tree dust and pollen. I will not die – phew! But be sure to carry a handkerchief is his prognosis. A what? Does anyone even have these so-last-century items in bottom drawers anymore? I carry throw-away menthol tissues instead. And I won’t be wearing a Tokyo-smog-alert, or Fukushima nuclear meltdown- type, face guard.
But a tree is not a four-letter word. I’m no Druid tree-worshipper but I know the London Plane (Platanus orientalis) supports animal habitats, absorbs car fumes, filters direct light in winter and radiates warmth and UV rays to ward off osteoporosis. In summer, they offer cooling shade and create soothing, cooling zephyrs to reduce the strain on our ever-more overloaded electricity grid.
They are a living, breathing, life-saving micro-climate.
In heritage-listed Victoria Street, Potts Point, their phalanx creates a silent sentinel: it’s a perfect adaptive re-use by nature herself.
Their beautiful branches arch to kiss, prayer-like, creating a cathedral of canopies.
Their equipage and equipoise enhance and protect neighbours’ privacy, moderating fierce winds with their foliage and knowingly intercept water run-off for storage within their roots to reduce street floods.
These trees have more energy and natural intelligence than all the City of Sydney Council ordinance rangers unit combined.
They’ve witnessed changes in Bourke Street, Surry Hills, over 85 years, fending off recent attacks from bike paths. In Potts Point, they stood witness on that cold winter’s day on July 4th 1975, as heritage campaigner, the late, great Mrs Juanita Nielsen hurried to an appointment with death, never to be seen again.
We’re deaf to their whispering secrets as they still stand vigil over her home.
They are living spirits and memorials to her passion.
And they embrace our city like an emerald necklace.
There are self-sacrificing: their only needs are water, pruning and empathy when they get pro-creative three weeks a year, spreading pollen.
Irritatators claim these minor reproductive mishaps threaten life on earth with pollen dust. Science doesn’t support this plane-trees-are-killers thesis.
Now, their own family tree and genetics are threatened. “But they’re not natives”, scream greenies, as though they are illegitimate orphans and must be immediately chainsaw-massacred and charcoaled.
Greenies prefer incompatible gum trees with their flailing bark, poor canopy, breaking branches and car duco-damaging, dripping gum.
Since ‘natives’ are anything born here, such claims are assinine.
Perhaps a perfect urban street tree has no thirst, no roots and solar panel-type ‘leaves’, Obviously, white-coated, test-tube CSIRO geneticists must research this new gene-tree project urgently, I suggest.
And earlier this year their annual autumnal leaves gently floated to earth.
They provided crunchy carpets of richly-textured matting as golden groves of plane trees keep ushering in the seasons, part of a heavenly time clock.
This is a self-sustaining stratagem well-worth saving.
And to that self–serving priesthood called Sydney Council I say, forget what your own know-it-all arborists tell you. Pollarding is the answer to pollen problems.
Why not adopt the modèle Parisienne? The world’s most elegant street, Avenue des Champs-Élysées, reserved for pedestrians and cyclists the first Sunday of every month, is a place of glory and grandeur.
Here, plane trees are not vilified or sneezed at; they are carefully coiffured and pollarded, a sixteenth-century word meaning to crop.
Each tree is a sculpted and trimmed by topiarists into a living work of art the tulip shape of a champagne glass flute – what else?
Small stockings are cradled under the lower branches where dust and pollen naturally fall into them, thus avoiding locals’ sensitive nostrils. Stockings are emptied once a month in the high season at sunset.
It’s all quiet and subtle, elegant, très chic and very French.
So I say Salut! and Merci! to my mute mates. Long may you reign over us.
You May Also Like
