What I Learned About Trees And Life From My Dad.

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In New Zealand, where I was born, and lived for most of my life, before moving a few years ago to Australia, the giant Kauri is generally regarded as the most spiritual of all the beautiful native trees to be found in the many protected State Forests that adorn the Shaky Isles.

Fully-grown, the Kauri is truly majestic, soaring more than 50 metres tall and straight into the sky, with a trunk girth of up to 16 metres; and it can live for over 2000 years.

The Kauri has a lot to teach us....

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Having endured the prolonged loss to irrecoverable mental illness, of the love of his life, my mother, my father went on to later lose, through his own serious illness, much of his health, most of his self-made wealth, and his hard-earned possessions, at a time when he ought to have been contemplating the start of a relaxed retirement. He didn’t believe in religion, (but did have an intense interest in “whatever’s going to happen after this life on Earth”), so he didn’t look to the church, God, or any other higher power for help. He’d never been big on self-pity either, although, through the character-building - as he’d have put it, events of a harsh, Depression-deprived childhood that took him from his mother soon after his father deserted the family, and denied him education beyond age thirteen, as well as a World War in which he suffered critical injuries in an intense fire, while heroically trying in vain to save another man, “this life” had by then given him more than enough reasons to take that option, had he so wished.

Instead, determined not to waste his remaining years "knowing today's Tuesday, because it's time to put the garbage out again", and against the firm advice of his doctor, he threw away his medications, spent what was left in the bank on a small, second-hand mobile home, and became effectively reborn, or at least, re-energised, by driving around the country, keeping pace with the warmth of the seasons, staying in remote locations, following a diet of fresh vegetables, fruit and water, and exploring on foot the deep inner sanctums of the native forests, gaining spiritual strength and renewed physical energy in the process. Even though he’d spent so few of his formative years at school, Dad wrote with a beautiful hand, and had a wonderfully lyrical way with words. In heartfelt and moving letters describing his latest re-awakening to Nature’s beauty, he often also wrote, “If I’m gone for any length of time, don’t come looking for a body to bury. What remains of me will be found one day, reunited with Mother Earth, with my arms wrapped around the trunk of a Kauri. I’ll already be where I want to be”.

But, contrary to his and his doctor's expectations, Dad didn't die. In fact he spent the next ten years on the road. When he and Full Circle, the name given by my sister to his mobile home, finally became too worn out to continue their travels, he settled back into a stationary, though far from sedentary, (he walked for miles every day) life on the Western tip of the country, in the sparsely populated Far North, also known as ‘the winterless North’, at the white-sand edge of a pristine turquoise blue horseshoe-shaped bay on the Hokianga harbour, nestled alongside the Waipoua State Forest, where Tane Mahuta, 1500 year-old 'Lord of the Forest', and New Zealand’s largest remaining Kauri, still lives. I don’t know whether Tane Mahuta remembers my Dad. But I know my Dad never forgot the power and the presence of the great tree. In fact, I believe it was the spiritual attraction of the Lord Kauri and his forest domain, as much as the warmth, that drew him back to 'the winterless North' to spend his final years.

When Dad finally did succumb several years later, it was sadly, back in the city, where he’d been forced by further illness to return for care. I think his enforced return to the city was one reason why that care too soon became palliative. Although, I wasn’t there, and have to thank my brother and my two sisters for their loving attention during Dad’s closing stages.

The particular combination of warmth, rainfall and geography that has enabled the Kauri to grow into its role as King of the New Zealand forest, is unique to the Northern part of the country, beginning at the Waikato, a lush dairy farming area that abuts the Southern flank of the metropolitan city of Auckland. The Kauri isn't found below this latitude. Usually....

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One of my cousins, who grew up in rural New Zealand, and with whom Dad always had a special connection, has a small farm in Hawkes Bay, in the Central North Island, over a hundred kilometres away from the Kauri's natural comfort zone. Each year, from a new photo sent to me on the anniversary of my father’s death, I follow the thriving progress of a still-young Kauri that breaks the rule. It’s the tree my cousin planted as a sapling, head-on to the elements, on a windswept open slope, in memory of a man he viewed as the personification of the essential character traits of the Kauri: Strength. Resilience. Fortitude. Survival. And an unbreakable connection to the spiritual power of Nature.

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I learned a lot from my Dad. About trees. And about life.

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