People’s favourite Bendigo trees. Childhood stories of lofty treehouses and rope swings and makeshift ladders disappearing into leafy canopies. Stories of loss – of tragic falls, and broken bones… and worse.

It seems all of us have a connection to trees that runs deeper than mere aesthetics or our need for shade and shelter.

One reader suggested that our bond with trees may have grown from the fact that we share similar physical characteristics. 

We stand upright, have a crown on top and mobile limbs stemming from a central trunk. The pattern of the tubular branches (bronchi) in our lungs is similar to the root system of many trees. And like humans, no two trees are the same.

At the physical level, trees provide oxygen, food and other material necessities, such as building materials and, as another reader pointed out, “pulp to produce the bloody Bendigo Advertiser”.

He may have been quoting Winston Churchill, who on a visit to Canada in 1929 commented to his son, “fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees to make bloody newspapers… and calling it civilisation.”

It’s a bit like a property developer bulldozing trees to make a housing estate and then naming the streets after them. You don’t have to look too far from home for examples.

But trees teach us resilience too – not only withstanding time and hardship, but also seizing opportunity.

I was on a real estate job during the week – an old Victorian home in central Bendigo – and in the desolate backyard that was little more than cracked and broken bitumen, I spotted a tiny birch tree poking it’s new leaves through the rubble.

The unthinkable odds. To float its seed over steel and glass and concrete and begin a life in such a meagre blip of soil. What a miracle. What a reminder that life does not await permission to be lived.

I thought of Emerson’s beautiful line, “The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.”

While that little birch tree reaches out towards an uncertain future, other trees act as signposts to the past.

Another property I visited was a former housing commission home built in the 1970s. In its front yard, the incongruous sight of a Norfolk Island Pine, at least 30 metres tall, clearly many years older than the house.

Whose hands placed it in the soil? What was on the site 100 years ago? If trees could talk, they’d be our greatest storytellers.

George Orwell wrote that the planting of a tree is a gift we can make to posterity at almost no cost and with little effort “…and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the effect of any of your other actions, good or evil.”

The tree as a symbol of redemption. 

That just might be the most beautiful image of all.