A chestnut and walnut orchard
Farm envy. Again. We went up to Kookootonga this week for a quick visit to friends. And all my shots on my camera seem to involve chestnut trees.
Perfectly pruned. Pristine. And a joy to behold. Oh, and under the trees all is grass and order thanks to over 500 sheep. My idea of heaven.
I always feel like a little kid with her training wheels on her bicycle looking at racing cyclists when I compare our chestnut trees and the Kookootonga ones.
And how surreal to get a second dose of the stink of chestnuts in flower in the same year. Ours flower in June, and now I get that hard to breathe sickly feel again in another part of the planet.
It’s not a winning scent if you are a human, but the bees and butterflies love it.
And there are bees on the farm now too. The hillside was humming.
Each morning Robyn and Mark go up on their quad bikes (or their incredible Toro) to check on the sheep and generally look around the fences and see that all is well.
How about this for a commute to work? That’s Sydney on the horizon.
As soon as I could, I set off for a walk along Mt Irvine Road. It was extraordinarily hot (31C) and being summer, that meant bushfire alerts. So you can almost feel the heat blowing through these eucalyptus trees.
The peace of the mountain was rather interrupted by the bush fire brigade who were sending in crews by helicopter to work on a fire. Over the next mountain is the Wollemi National Park. Home to the secret and famous Wollemi pine. (http://www.wollemipine.com/index.php)
So they put in a lot of work ensuring the secret grove of trees are never burned. They even chopper in small diggers to clear land. It’s all secretive and rather thrilling. If very noisy.
I completed my tree hugging walk by going to visit Uncle Bill’s Tasmanian Blackwood plantation. It’s an acacia (a wattle tree – Acacia melanoxylon) and makes tremendous wood for flooring. This stand of around 1000 trees was planted by Bill after he suffered a dreadful series of heart attacks. So in thanks to making it through he determined to plant trees for his grandchildren’s future.
And no, this is not an arboretum. This is a farm where all trees are crops. Chestnuts, walnuts, and this stand of Blackwood. They won’t be ‘ready’ for another thirty years. And in the meantime, I just love to visit them and admire their incredible leaves.
Tree hugging over, it’s time to head back to Sydney.