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The Way We Look at Trees
A conversation between Louise Wright of Baracco+Wright Architects and Dave Witty
The tree we sat under to talk, February 2025. Photograph by Louise Wright
- Louise Wright
- We’ve met in Elwood, a southern suburb of Melbourne (Naarm), near the bay. And we’re just about to go and sit underneath a she-oak.
- Dave Witty
- This tree means quite a lot to me. I used to come here when my daughter was just a few months old. We would get out the picnic rug and sit beneath the beautiful shade of the tree. But most importantly, she loved this tree—it’s called a drooping she-oak (Allocasuarina verticillata)—because she would feel the branchlets which hang down like bead curtains. She would love to just touch them and play with them. And the seed cones are very distinctive as well. They’re kind of like mini grenades in a way. And they’ve got very sort of pointy beaks all over them, and she’d feel them and roll them around in the palm of her hand. We’d always come to this tree, and she’d be happy just playing around in the shade. So that’s why it’s got a personal connection for me.
- LW
- I know about this tree and asked Dave to show it to me because I read about it in his book, What the Trees See.1 I came to Dave’s book because I was searching for an Australian reference about Australian trees. The title spoke to me because I am interested in the urban environment from the perspective of the tree. As an architect, I’m trying to understand our impact on trees and how we can share space with them and make more space for them and make better conditions for them. So, this title suggested to me that maybe the book was about the perspective of the tree, which I think it certainly is, but it’s also about the tree as sort of, how would you describe it, Dave, as a historical witness?
- DW
- Exactly. I mean, there are certain trees I like to sit beneath that are three to four hundred years old. There’s one just down the road from here called the ngargee tree, which means corroboree tree. It’s a river red gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) that’s thought to be maybe four to five hundred years old and there’s written accounts of some of the early European settlers watching a corroboree beneath the tree. I’d sit beneath this tree and imagine just how that landscape—and how, really, the world—has changed in that space of time. What I find interesting about trees as witnesses is that you can, with just a bit of knowledge of history, you can kind of see the landscape unfolding as a chronological series of events. Often when you are looking at history, you’re jumping back to a specific year or a specific period and just immersing yourself in that time, but you’re not really looking at how things have got to that point, and how that period has influenced the subsequent moments in history. Whereas when you sit beneath a tree and imagine the landscape unfolding, you can start to see how the world has changed. You get a different perspective.
Sitting beneath that river red gum, you can see a very different world. Three hundred years ago, the people there, the Bunurong, would go down to the shoreline to look for oysters. That particular area, St. Kilda, was an important place for sandstone for sharpening tools. The landscape around the ngargee tree quickly changed. A lot of those trees around the river red gum were cut down and replaced by willows and pine trees and all the trees that were fashionable for the British imperialists. It’s now turned into a kind of pleasure park, the Albert Park area. I was hoping the book would get across that if you start to imagine the landscape as evolving, you can see history a little bit differently.
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Dave Witty, What the Trees See (Monash University Publishing, 2023). ↩
Ngargee tree, February 2025. Photograph by Dave Witty
- LW
- It’s helpful that you mentioned the river red gum because they still exist, even right in the centre of Melbourne, or sort of CBD edges. I use them to teach students about the presence of water and the indication of preexisting landscapes, or as Traditional Owners would say, those landscapes still exist, they’re just under the concrete now. But if you know even just a little bit about trees and the plant communities and landscapes that they were a part of, it tells you about what was there before the places urbanized, and it makes you see those places in a different way. It is important for makers of the urban environment to see and notice that these places are for other living things, not just us. In this moment where we are rethinking cities after the post-industrial city, we can share space with these other living things instead of just this deep inequality of land use. And I think Australian cities or urban environments are really unique, internationally, in that they still have these little bits of pre-colonial landscapes, which is sort of incredible, really like ancient landscapes right up in the city. With this kind of way of seeing, we could use these moments to start this kind of “re-city.”
- DW
- Absolutely. River red gums, as you say, if you talk to Traditional Custodians across Australia, they’re often a sign that water is nearby. They also present a lot of shade and often a lot of traditional activities involve sitting beneath them. They also represent life. Around Melbourne along the Werribee River, or say Woodlands Park, there are a lot of three to four hundred year old trees. There’s a huge amount of life, insect life, birds utilizing the hollows all along the trunk. And it’s working in an ecosystem with the other plants around it. There can be more than a thousand species using one river red gum tree across the year.
Elsternwick Park with the river red gums planted on a lawn, appearing like “lollipops.” Comparatively, river red gum in woodland would look similar but with a bushy understorey at different heights, some smaller trees (such as wattles and cherry ballart) and a diversity of species, rather than one species and lawn. February, 2025. Photograph by Dave Witty
- DW
- I bring this up because not far from where we are, is a place called Elsternwick Park, where they have tried to plant native trees. There’s lots of river red gums that have been planted, potentially in the last thirty, forty years, but they’ve been planted in a way that doesn’t recreate the natural environment. They call it a lollipop park where there’s just grass and lawn and then these individual trees sticking up like little lollipops. What that means is that a particular bird, called a noisy miner, basically takes over an area to the point where it becomes devoid of smaller birds. That just goes to show, it’s the same tree, but the tree needs to be in community. It can’t just exist on its own.
- LW
- And so, our sort of current way of thinking about trees in urban environments is very much like that—there’s space for a tree, or they’re aligned, or contained in a nature strip or small space. And that’s a big problem for a tree.
- DW
- Yeah, we’ve got to change the way we look at these things. I work in urban planning and in the planning scheme, when it talks about a tree, it says you need to plant a tree that’s going to reach a height of between six and eight metres—a medium-sized tree that will reach maturity in a few years. It is almost treating it like a mathematical problem. For the tree to achieve the perfect height aesthetically and the perfect amount of shade to reduce the urban heat island effect it needs to be this particular size. It completely ignores the fact that different trees have very different properties working in very different contexts. You can’t just look at the one individual tree—you must be thinking about biodiversity in a much broader sense, all the potential interactions that can be possible from planting this tree. We need to somehow get from this one end of the extreme where really, we’re just focused on…
- LW
- Service of the tree, maybe.
- DW
- Indeed. And in fact, service is a good word. We look at trees for how we can use them for the resources they provide for us. And we don’t look at trees for the importance they provide amongst a series of many different interconnected relationships. We are moving towards that, and it’s going to require, I think, a big shift in thinking from a lot of people to go from that one extreme to another.
Another she-oak (Allocasuarina littoralis). Black she-oak inside the Garden House by Baracco+Wright Architects. The “house” has unsealed ground and was located on an area of fill on a site whose indigenous vegetation is being restored in south east Melbourne. Recently a hole was made in the roof to allow the tree to keep growing and receive rain water. Photograph by Rory Gardiner. © Rory Gardiner
- LW
- Architects don’t always have a lot of control over these more public spaces and what goes on there, but we can advocate and make different decisions on individual sites—where you leave space, what’s next door that you might be able to join into, what you can make space for and put back. There’s a lot of things that you can do. And then of course, advocating on a wider scale in order to change the way we see the world, which is really at the heart of it, I think. It’s like if you can’t see something, you can’t care about it. So, this blind spot is a place to focus our attention.
I try to address this blind spot with architecture students where we look at the built environment or the way we make a building from the perspective of a tree. Trees have been used in a service way in architecture for a long time. There are many much-celebrated projects that sort of “integrate with the tree” but actually aren’t that great for the tree. So, we try and look at a lot of those projects and unpack that relationship. I guess one way of just changing our perspective is just to think from the life of the tree and its different relationships. - DW
- On an individual level, I think that one huge influence that people can have is deciding which tree to plant in their garden, or even being part of community consultations for councils in terms of their tree species selection for street trees and parks and reserves, because these decisions are important. And potentially these trees are going to be living for fifty, sixty years, some more than a hundred years old. So, the decisions we make can have huge consequences. As we said before with the way the river red gums were planted over in Elsternwick Park, and often when it comes to deciding what trees to plant, a big part of that has been an aesthetic choice. There’s been a move recently to preferring native species over exotics and looking at what birds you can attract to your garden through different species. But that conversation is a very, very nuanced one.
- LW
- From my perspective, a lot of the time the choices of trees are around compatibility with structures—root systems not being too thirsty or aggressive, not making too much mess on roofs, leaves dropping, not overhanging buildings. Poor trees, they’re just trying to get a bit of moisture and oxygen. I mean, it’s very practical. It’s driven by a type of maintenance that’s not about care or carefulness, but just about a sort of cost and ease. So that would drive the choice of tree or also the removal of trees in proximity to a building. There’s a lot of negativity around the relationship of trees and buildings generally. Many people would not hesitate to cut down a tree for the sake of a building, but very rarely would a building or a road be removed for the sake of a tree. That inequality is incredible to me: a tree’s existence—depending on how you measure the world—is infinitely more valuable across time and space. So again, another way of thinking about buildings and living things is to look at different footing systems for buildings that can allow a building to just be in proximity with a tree. We’re adapting, we’re sharing, we’re changing, rather than asking so much from the tree all the time.
Another she-oak (Allocasuarina littoralis). Black she-oak inside the Garden House by Baracco+Wright Architects. The “house” has unsealed ground and was located on an area of fill on a site whose indigenous vegetation is being restored in south east Melbourne. Recently a hole was made in the roof to allow the tree to keep growing and receive rain water. Photograph by Rory Gardiner. © Rory Gardiner
- DW
- There is an example down the road of a kurrajong tree (Brachychiton populneus), which is heritage listed by the National Trust. It’s about a hundred years old, not native to the area or anything, but planted quite a long time ago and it was seen as important to retain. We have tree protection zones, and you can’t build within more than 10% of a tree protection zone to allow its roots to do their thing, but when this site was developed, they built the apartment block right up next to the tree, which is very rare in this day and age. The building is probably cutting through about 50% of that tree protection zone, going against all planning requirements, but it’s just created this wonderful interface where the tree and the building work together. A rarity around here, but it’s an example of what can be done if those decisions are made.
- LW
- How are they working together? Does the building make space for the tree or…?
- DW
- The building is basically showing respect for the tree. There’s almost an acknowledgement in the design that the tree was there first, and the building is just fitting in around it, as should be the case. I mean, we come from a cultural mindset here in Australia which Robin Boyd described as this idea of “arboraphobia” (fear of trees) that really over the last seventy, eighty years, all these landscapes were just completely cleared of vegetation to make way for new suburbs.1 That kind of mindset is still in evidence today in the new suburbs being built on the outskirts of town. But this example, with the kurrajong, is the opposite, where more respect is given to the tree than the building.
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Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness (F.W. Cheshire, 1960), 74-100. ↩
