Conservation Comment:Trees spark thirst for adventure

Magic: Arlo's pear tree finally bears fruit.

My Whanganui childhood was full of trees. The magnolia's curved branches were easy to scramble up but a dead end in a game of hide and seek. The fleshy white flowers were top currency in our childhood pecking Order of Things. When the seed pods hardened, you had families of knobbly one-legged people to fill your pockets and trade with.

Once I got stuck in the mulberry tree. I don't know how we did it. My sister was the culprit: one year younger but stronger and more agile even then. We must have been about two and three.

There we were, sitting on a branch about two metres off the ground, stuffing our faces with scarlet, dripping mulberries, covered from head to chubby toe in blood-red stain. Once the mulberries were out of reach, and our immediate pleasure satisfied, we realised how high up we were. And how caught, in a double dilemma: call Mum, our unquestioned rescuer in all difficulties, but be unable to escape her ire when she saw the mess we were in. It must have worked out okay, because I haven't yet shied from adventure.

The pear was our giraffe. Its crooked trunk and long, straight neck kept us galloping for hours. One of us had to make do with the apple tree nearby; it was a less handsome horse that never caught up. Sometimes we would double up, but you could go faster on your own, Whanganui's westerly wind urging you on through faraway landscapes, past castles, giants and oases.

Past the chookhouse was the orchard full of pears, quince, cooking apples and eating apples like Russet, Granny Smith and Peasgood Nonsuch. To gain points on the kid coolness scale, you ate the core too.

Near the hay barn was a line of eucalypts. The gum nuts were the real hats of real creatures, as demonstrated in my favourite book Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. But the best treasures were the caterpillars. You had to look hard but, once discovered, these iridescent green-and-blue creatures were the most beautiful living thing in the whole world of our Brunswick farm. We watched them grow to the length of our hands, form brown nut-like cocoons and finally emerge as emperor gum moths.

In the bush, we entered the hushed world of dark green and vines. The supplejack reminded me of my great uncle who, when Dad was a boy, came home from the war and spent his time alone here, swinging on his supplejack swing.

In the middle of the bush, the pukatea was the biggest and oldest tree of my childhood. How old? Five hundred years? Did moa once snuffle around its wide buttressed roots? We sat on these roots and played hushed games in its dark crevices and caves. It still towers over the little piece of bush Dad put into QEII Covenant many years ago, and some of his ashes have nourished it.

My childhood spanned the 1960s. Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring the year I got stuck in the mulberry tree. In 2017, apart from the pukatea and the magnolia, those other trees are gone. The Brunswick farm where I grew up no longer supports a family of nine.

Now I live near Dunedin, putting trees back. What used to be a sheep paddock has pears, apples, plums and nuts. We're growing eucalypts and acacias for coppicing, trying out pine nuts and sugar maples, and are carefully nurturing a couple of black mulberry trees. Along the stream we've planted rimu, kahikatea, southern rata and other natives.

My grandson's pear tree, which he planted himself at age four, gave him four juicy fruit this year. Long after my ashes have been spread around this orchard, I would like to think his grandchildren might be nourished by these trees. May they get covered in scarlet blood-red mulberries and never shy from adventure.

Rosemary Penwarden is a Whanganui-born grandmother living near Dunedin.