They lit up the big sequoia in front of the legislature this week, which raised the obvious question: why don’t we write love letters to trees like the Australians do?
That’s what came to mind after Victoria’s Dr. Mary-Wynne Ashford relayed a story from Melbourne, which has experienced a flood of valentines to the city’s eucalyptuses, golden elms and other leafy specimens.
It goes like this: A few years ago, Melbourne reacted to a drought by posting an interactive map showing the location of 70,000 trees, each of them numbered, so that residents could report those in distress. What happened, though, was that people from around the world began emailing their favourite trees directly with expressions of arborial ardour.
“Dear Rose Gum, I have cycled by you each day and wanted you to know how much joy you give me,” read a typical letter.
“Dear Smooth-barked Apple Myrtle, I have always wanted to meet you, but tragically, I am in New York,” said another.
There was even evidence of a tree triangle: “Dear 1517937, I am confessing something very dear to me. I have fallen in love with 583182. I also feel guilty for cheating on 1023379 but yet I justified it by the fact that 1023379 is expected to die in under a year.”
Sometimes Melbourne city hall staff help the trees write back.
The City of Victoria has its own map listing 33,000 municipally owned trees by number, address and species (you can find it by going to opendata.victoria.ca and searching for “tree species”) but so far there’s little evidence of local Druids penning sonnets to the cedars, or whatever.
This lack of larch love is a tad surprising, given that Victoria is to tree-hugging what Edmonton is to frostbite and Vancouver is to celebrity runaway barges. Given how much locals wax on about monkey puzzle trees, Garry oaks (not, as a Times Colonist reporter once discovered, the name of a municipal arborist) and arbutuses (which they love until they try to rake the leaves) you would think they could at least come up with the odd “I once knew a yew from Nantucket….”
Victorians will show passion if individual trees are threatened, though. In 2019, when a beloved, windswept horse chestnut that leaned drunkenly over Dallas Road was sacrificed for a bike lane and sewer work, you would have thought city hall had shot an orca. That same year, 1,200 people signed a petition to save a birch on Humboldt, which is 1,200 more than petitioned to have the city install a concrete ping pong table on the same street.
Some individual trees become rock stars: the Carmanah Giant, Big Lonely Doug, the Red Creek Fir (and if you haven’t done so yet, do yourself a favour and read The Golden Spruce.) Sequoias are particularly popular, including the one that for 25 Christmases has been illuminated at Campus Honda on Finlayson, and another that kids like to climb across from the Beacon Hill Park petting farm. Protesters occasionally scale the specimen at the legislature, too, including one guy who in 1990 brought a sleeping bag and spent a December night in the upper branches, leading authorities to unplug the lights so that he didn’t get electrocuted.
Some trees are less well-known than they should be, though. One third of the 600 London Plane trees planted along Shelbourne Street in memory of the dead of the First World War remain. At Mesachie Lake on the shores of Cowichan Lake, you can still find the remnants of the magnificent collection of 270 trees of 80 varieties from around the world — catalpa, locust, European lime — planted by the mill-owning Stone family in the 1940s. (In the old days, company gardeners tended the front lawns of the village’s homes. The Stones gave fruit trees to the residents, too.) Treesofvictoria.com speaks of more than 249 English oaks from England’s Great Windsor Park that were planted around the Victoria area in 1937 to commemorate the coronation of King George VI.
That last website is a relatively new resource, guiding locals through their urban forest. It speaks of 300 Greater Victoria heritage trees, as well as a diversity that isn’t found in the wild: “While Vancouver Island has only 34 species of native trees, those in an urban environment could be plantings from anywhere in the world.”
Why, our trees could even come from Melbourne, though there’s no reason they would want to leave, being so well-loved where they are.
