PICTURE: People are still emailing in poems and love letters more than a decade on.()
Love trees in our neighbourhood?
Enough to write them a letter expressing our feelings and appreciation for what they provide?
MORE THAN A DECADE AGO, every council-owned tree in Melbourne was given an email address.
Zila Gordon, in: City of Melbourne’s Urban Forest project still attracting weekly love letters to trees, (ABC Radio Melbourne, 21 May 2023) reports that:
It was a way for the City of Melbourne to track any maintenance, but it soon took a more poetic turn.
and that little street that goes up the side. I’ve always wondered about you
ever since my slightly strange driving instructor who always smelled like cat food and peppermints
told me that you were his favourite tree,“
wrote one Melburnian, to a tree.
Monash University researcher and social media historian Julian O’Shea told ABC Radio Melbourne people had started writing love letters and poems after the Urban Forest project’s launch in 2012.
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We could adopt something similar in Lake Macquarie and Newcastle and …. write an email to a tree we love and appreciate to tell our friends and Council that we care and that we really truly want as many trees kept standing in our neighbourhoods as possible.
We could love a tree at Munibung Hill and post a note online to say we care about you and acknowledge the habitat you provide for local wildlife. Send us a picture of a tree you love and write a note to say what it is you like the most about her. Don’t be shy.
MMM … Issue 39, August – September 2023
