MIGHTY TREE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 236, 5 October 1936, Page 5

MIGHTY TREE.

ST. LEONARD'S OAK. !" HUNDRED FEET SPREAD. ( HOW OlrlJ CAN" IT BE 7 When it was planted is a mystery. Seventy years ago it is said to have .been as big as it is now, and to-day it spreads its soft spring greenness over an area of almost 8000 square feet. It is an oak tree, one of the noblest of its kind, and it grows in a forsaken garden in ■ St. Leonard's Road, Mount Eden. It must be one of the largest oaks in Auckland. It seems hardly just to speak of the iriajesty of a great tree in prosaic terms of figures; but these do give some indication of Its size. The greatest girth of its trunk is 21ft l.in, while it towers upwards for 80ft. - About 3ft from ths ground it splits into two great branches, each with the proportion of, a large tree. One has a circumference of 12ft 6in, and the other of 10ft. The first branch from the larger trunk is sft 7in. But it is not the girth that makes it majestic, or the height. As a matter of fact, a mere 80ft is nothing compared to some of Auckland's upreaching trees. It is the spread. For 50 feet on every side of the trunk it has tossed out its branches. They taper a twisted way from an iron might near the trunk out far yonder to these twigs, so slight that the least breeze will cause them to shiver. So crooked are some of the branches that they look as if the air through which they have crept, year by year, has actively opposed their passage. They have the same appearance as a small stream that has blindly sought the easiest winding way down a valley. By the growth of these limbs it is possible to tell the direction of the prevailing wind. The tree has leaned itself gradually to the north-east—not that the trunk itself has a bias, but the greatest profusion of growth is to that side.

Subject for a Poem. It must have been of such a giant as this that the poem, "Trees," so well known as almost to be hackneyed, must have been written. Somehow such a giant seems as inevitable as time itself. It is so firmly rooted in the ground. It is so strong, though there is no protuberance of root to demonstrate it. It is to a tree or to the hills that you must go for peace. It seems one with time itself. _ Consider the tree in this, the spring time. The fingers of its limbs are tipped with a film of green, softening the stark nakedness of its branches and making them a jjlace of shadow. Its branches, sd'solid-looking and powerful near the trunk, through inevitable growth, have dissipated their strength in a thousand branchlets, until their might has been lost in this maze of green tracery. And through the maze the sun slants, and the ground, green in grass itself, is laced with sunshine and shade. And no one knows how old the tree is. There is an oak in a garden in Aratonga Avenue which was planted b\ the Duke of Edinburgh when here in 1869. Yet that tree is a mere sapling compared with this. It is in the property of Mr. J. Crawford, himself an old man. He says it was just as large when his father bought the property over 70 years ago. While it is true that oaks grow much more quickly in a warmer New Zealand than they do in their native habitat, England, yet 70 years is not far removed from a century, and that reaches back into the dajjs before Hobson founded Auckland, or the Maoris signed the Treaty of Waitangi. An Ancient Pear Tree. This area must have been early settled by nearby, in the property of Mr. F. S. Dyson, is growing the father of all pear trees This tree also, according to Mr. Crawford, was large 70 years ago. This fruit tree is 47ft Gin high, with a girth, one foot from the ground, of Bft 4in. Its spread is 47ft. One year, Mr. Dyson said, the tree bore two tons of fruit, and pears weighing as much as have been taken off it. The tree at present is clothed, not with a soft green, but with a mass of white blossom, blending in a curious way with the .white-greyness of the trunk.