Will you join me in sharing your home tree?

Share a photo* of your special tree (and the story behind it, if you'd like to) on:

Instagram: Tag @myhometreeSA and/or use the hashtag #myhometreeSA
Facebook: Use the hashtag #myhometreeSA

*Only posts shared as 'public' can be reposted on our accounts

We all have a home tree.

Perhaps you’ve always know this, but only this year it dawned on me just how important these landmarks are – and how we often have more than one. My current home tree is the beautiful big old grey box I am fortunate enough to have in my backyard.

I’m so lucky to be its custodian and enjoy all the life it brings into mine: kookaburras, lorikeets, kurrawongs, and the occasional koala.

You don’t need to have a big garden to have a home tree – it might be a potted lemon tree at your front door that greets you every night when you arrive home from work.

It might be a tree that you see when you’re 'almost there', either on the way to your favourite holiday spot, or on the way home after visiting friends or family.

Sadly, not all our home trees are still with us.

Last year I was at 270 Brighton Road, filming the destruction of the beautiful River Red Gum the community had rallied to save.

We hadn’t been successful, and I was there to film the tree’s removal being rushed through by the developer before the community could get wind of it. I was commenting on what was going on when I realised that I was losing a personal landmark.

Living at Hove as a kid, I traveled back and forth to my grandparents at Torrens Park. The Brighton Road tree was the one we saw when we turned homeward, tired after spending the weekend with a busy family. It was the tree that told us we were almost home.

As I talked about how much the tree had meant to me as a child, that it had been a landmark for me, I choked up. I realised that we all have trees that are landmarks for us: our home trees. They are part of the fabric of our lives, and we can’t take them for granted.