The Meaning of Trees

My first Liebster Award nominee has got her response underway! Kay McKenzie Cooke from Dunedin, New Zealand has posted answers to my first two questions. It was great reading what she shared and I felt very honoured that Kay who was born and raised in Southland called me a Southlander – a rare privilege indeed. Thank you Kay!

Kay shared this personal story and I found it very powerful:

My son once said while travelling, that if he wanted to feel ‘at home’ in a strange place, he’d look for the oldest tree he could find, and sit by it to ground himself and gather in a sense of ‘place’.

Which made me think about trees and their significance to me, to us…

Looking through Nigel’s photo archive I found these photos showing our appreciation and enjoyment of trees. These trees have no particular claim to fame, they’re ordinary albeit massive willows in the Queenstown Lakes area of the South Island – we lived in Queenstown at the time – years ago now 🙂

You can click on this photo to enlarge if you wish

It felt really special to be there in this beautiful light on that particular day. We walked along the path through the dappled light, wandering further before eventually retracing our steps.

---

My first memory of a particular colour and a particular tree are one and the same – a beautiful BIG fig tree in our personal home orchard when my Dad was an orchardist. In the summer it had big branches reaching up high and a dense green canopy of fig leaves so that the whole space under the canopy glowed green. To stand in that space was like being in my own enchanted world! The tree also produced copious amounts of delicious figs. The memory of the fig tree is very special to me 🙂

---

Text by Liz, photos by us both; Exploring Colour (2020)