The sign is emphatic. “Historic Tree”, it declares, pointing at the tree in question, an old gum which is so enormous it almost certainly doesn’t require a sign to get you to notice it. The giant exotic must be as tall as a four-storey building.
This is the sort of thing you expect to find when promenading in Greytown, the most genteel of South Wairarapa’s three main townships. The townsfolk appear to be very, very proud of their colonial heritage and are quite meticulous about labelling it.
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that every house and business on the main street, which happens to double as SH2, has a small sign on it describing the building’s provenance, proclaiming things like, “This tōtara cottage was built in 1853 by the Rev James Cuckoo, the town’s first religious crank. He was hanged in 1888 for blasphemy.” I might have made that up, but you get the olde worlde picture.
In a town so interested in celebrating its colonial built-history, it comes as no surprise to the visitor that the village’s current burghers also honour – and festoon with signs – the more notable colonial plantings, as well.
This isn’t something new. Greytown has been celebrating trees generally for much its life; the country’s first Arbor Day was marked in Greytown on July 3, 1890.
Which brings us back to the “Historic Tree”. It, along with a slap-up lunch at the White Swan Hotel (make sure you have the dumplings and the crème brûlée) was what brought us to fair Greytown on a fair winter’s Saturday.
Listed as “the Greytown Gum”, the Eucalyptus regnans is one of the six finalists in the fourth annual Tree of the Year competition, a contest run by the NZ Notable Trees Trust. Also competing this year is a Morton Bay fig in Auckland Domain called “The Fairy Tree”, the “Phantom Rātā” in Bay of Plenty, a redwood at Rangiora Borough School, “Te Herenga Ora”, a cluster of tī kōuka (cabbage trees) in Christchurch and “the Chook Tree” at Waianakarua in North Otago. The last is a macrocarpa which looks a bit like a giant chicken. To strengthen that claim, it has a giant fake egg next to it, which is chicanery if you ask me.
To qualify for the competition a tree has to be “special” to a community and also have a bit of a story to it, which Greytown’s “Historic Tree” most certainly has, according to one of its three signs.
It reads: “Samuel Oates Gum Tree 1856”. The story goes that our gum tree was one of 12 seedlings pushed in a wheelbarrow over the Remutaka Hill track from Wellington in 1856 by a bloke called Samuel Oates, a task given to him by one Charles Rooking Carter, whose name now graces nearby Carterton.
As anyone who has ever driven over the Remutakas will tell you, they’re bloody steep. So it is no surprise that on arriving with the seedlings in Greytown, Samuel Oakes decided to wet his whiskers at the Rising Sun Hotel (since deceased).
It was while slaking his thirst with local ale that three of the 12 seedlings were pinched from his wheelbarrow by person or persons unknown. What is known is that all three were then planted in various parts of Greytown.
Now, 169 years later, only the one with the three signs remains, making the Greytown Gum the sole survivor of not just history, but of a highway robbery. Which means the emphatic road sign has it all wrong. It shouldn’t say “Historic Tree”, it should say “Historic Crime Scene”.
While Michele and I were admiring the Historic Crime Scene, two young women stopped to have a gander at it as well, so we told them about the gum being in the Tree of the Year competition and encouraged them to vote for it before the ballot closes on June 30.
One shook her head. “I’m going to have to vote for a native,” she said earnestly. There was a pause. Then she turned to the giant gum. “Sorry,” she said.
