Trees

Our garden contained many mature trees, some of which were definitely climbable. There was a lovely copper beech, many tall camellias, a spreading pin oak, maples, lilly pillies and a horse chestnut. Fruiting trees included a patch of plums, lots of apple trees, a lemon, orange, mandarin, several grapefruit and a large chestnut. The two date palms unfortunately never produced viable fruit in our too cold climate! Lots of conifers, including spruce, oregon and pine trees, pencil pines and a range of other cypresses were growing in many sections of the garden.

Tourist Track

We enjoyed walks amongst the tree ferns on the Tourist Track which meandered beside the Menzies creek at the bottom of the hill. The postcard image below shows an earlier view near the track. By the time we began walking along it, the mountain ash trees were much taller and the area was much shadier.

It was important to “keep to the track” as quite a number of deep mine shafts from the gold mining days were (and probably still are) hidden amongst the undergrowth.

We heard about a near miss one day. A tree that had fallen across the track was to be removed by the shire ranger. He had cut it with a chainsaw on one side of the track then stepped over the log before cutting the other side. The log then fell down a mineshaft which was right where he would have been standing if he hadn’t changed sides!