Love Letters to Leaves: Melbournians’ Whimsical Notes to Urban Trees
Strolling though a shaded Melbourne, Australia park, a gnarled tree with twisting branches catches your eye. Its solid presence exudes sage experience weathering city life’s commotion. So on a whim back home, you email this stalwart tree a friendly update on your week – and soon receive a thoughtful treemail response!
This distinctly Melbourne experience springs from an innovative civic project allowing residents to report arboreal issues that sparked wider connectedness between citizens and urban nature. It reflects Australians’ affection for the natural realm intermingling with human habitats. But also shines light on timeless benefits linking people and plants through creativity and care.
Message in a Bottlebrush
In 2013, Melbourne Australia, confronted a worrisome backlog of tree maintenance. Nearly 70,000 public trees showed risks like hanging dead branches requiring care. Understaffed for inspections, the city devised a crowd-assisted monitoring system. Each tree Now sports a unique ID – #1022165 or #3752281. More importantly carries individual email addresses publicly listed for convenient reporting.
Hoping for a few dozen notes about damaged limbs or fungus annually, the city underestimated Melbournian imagination. Soon a deluge of tree love letters flooded officials’ inboxes instead – thousands of charming, whimsical notes sent directly expressing affection for residents’ leafy neighbors.
These mini-missives covered life updates, holiday plans, encouragement for upcoming finals or reading recommendations. The sheer enthusiasm spurred administrators to craft thoughtful replies pretending to come straight from the boughs. And just like that, a bureaucratic list of public assets blossomed into a full-fledged epistolary ode to urban nature.
Why Write Trees?
Mental Health and Community
So what motivated Melbournians to email local trees as pen pals? Perhaps partly pandemic isolation. But this project surtout taps deeper awareness of nature’s benefits to mental health and community building.
Studies show even incidental contacts with plants and green spaces lifts spirits and cognitive skills. And shared appreciation of specific trees helps nurture place attachment binding residents. Like 19th century Romantics, modern urbanites also simply yearn for connection: transcending separateness through creative communion with other beings, however rooted.
For youth facing stressful exams, elderly people living alone or new parents overwhelmed with a crying baby, opening one’s heart to a sturdy silent tree can offer surprising solidarity. And replying as the wise oak, maple or willow only extends this living dialogue further.
Through this small civic experiment, Melbourne Australia moved minds from conceiving trees as problems towards embracing them as partners. And this shift elevated recognition all cities need more plentiful, healthier and loved urban forests in coming years, not less. If sustainability depends on solidarity across species lines, such creative empathy seems a valuable seed to nurture indeed.
So next time you pass trees waving in your hometown, consider a short friendly hello. Trade a weekend update or thank them simply for cooling shade on a blazing summer’s day. Channeling even playful appreciation grows awareness we all share public habitats together, relying equally on environmental resilience or social bonds for wellbeing. And who knows? Maybe you’ll receive sage advice or reassurance winging back as if whispered on bark-scented breezes. Because sometimes to find familiar voices, we need merely send greetings to the wise elders surrounding us if we listen closely enough.
You can explore the map and the trees here: City of Melbourne Urban Forest