I posted yesterday about National Schools Tree Day. And this Sunday, 31st July 2011, is National Tree Day.
This is a great excuse to get the family outdoors, celebrate trees and all they do for us, and do some good for the environment. If you want to engage with others in your local community, you can use the online tool to find out what events are happening in your area (or even register your own event!).
For our part, my family will be planting some more fruit and nut trees in our yard.
As a bit of a promotion for National Tree Day, Planet Ark has sent me a $50 Bunnings gift card to give away. One lucky reader can use it to buy some trees!
To enter the draw, simply leave a comment below telling me what your favourite type of tree is, and why.
The giveaway is only open to people from Australia (Bunnings is an Australian store, so the prize would be useless to everyone else!), but overseas readers are welcome to comment too. You can list multiple trees and/or make multiple comments, but you’ll only get one entry into the draw per person.
I’ll select the winner at random from all eligible comments made before 8:00 pm AEST on Sunday the 31st.
What is your favourite type of tree, and why?
At the moment I’d like to put in some Apple trees. I love the blossoms and the fruit of course!
A Lemon Tree, It is lovely and green, smells fantastic and provides fruit that makes everything from lemon meringue to spray and wipe!
Considering all the fruit trees I’ve planted this year (13) you’d think it’d be a fruit tree, but it’s actually a tree I’ve never owned and probably never will.
I just love peppercorn trees. They take up so much space and nothing can grow under them…. but they look so beautiful and remind me of the country. If I had lots of land, I’d have a peppercorn tree outside my house.
I love the Peppercorn tree also, its fine leaves make it a pretty picture. I also love the Silver Birch and would like to try and defy the odds and grow it at home in Kanahooka. My other favourite tree is the Blueberry Ash. I love its form and colour. I am a very practical person though, so I have planted as many dwarf fruit trees as I can, and just have one more to source – a dwarf Japanese Seedless Mandarin. Happy Gardening
Sonia
Hi Darren. I like wattle trees. I have fond memories growing up with a big tree in our front yard.
Liquid amber. When I was young all the kids living in the street used to climb up this one big liquid amber tree in our front yard. We gave names to the different branches. One of them was named Jabba Jaw, a reference to a cartoon at the time I think. Lots of fond memories playing in the tree anyway.
My favourite is the fig tree. Luscious fruit for eating & jam, beautiful shade in summer, but deciduous so lets in the sunshine in winter, dropped leaves to go in the compost, beautiful gnarled sculptural branches, tough & hardy! And you can use the leaves to cover your bits if you are caught naked in the garden!!!
Kate
The lurker appears! (in a hope of winning something, of course). My favourite tree? An oak. So much forklore and beauty and majesty.
I wish I could savour something more practical BUT I cannot help but love no other more than the Jacaranda. If the purple bloom did not have such a mesmerising hold over me I would be able to claim the Tamarilo as my much more respectable favorite.
Small Leaf Jaboticaba. It can be used as a feature tree or a hedge. It produces copious amounts of fruit after 6 years or so. As the fruit forms on the trunk, there is no problem with pruning. The fruit is fantastic eaten fresh, used in baking, cooked for a jam, or made into wine/port.
I have 12 of these trees in the ground so far at Maculata Grove and I hope to get my first harvest in one or two years from now.
I like my blueberry tree, the kids love picking the blueberries and eating them
After getting back from the grocery store… I’d have to say a privately owned Banana tree in the backyard! I could undercut Wollies and sell for $13.99 per kilo.
A very hard question to answer as there are so many wonderful species to choose from.
Last Christmas I spent in Europe with my family and saw many large LIVE pine trees decorated with ribbons, lights, baubles and topped with snow. They were truly one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.
So wonderful to know that people were not chopping down these gorgeous trees for Christmas but instead decorating and celebrating the tree’s beauty alive.
So my favourite tree is the pine tree.
My favorite (more like Korin’s favourite 🙂 tree is Weeping Willow
Lucky you Carlos, the weevils ate my blueberry bush before I even got it planted in the ground, and my Feijoa.
Even though they’re probably not native to Aus, I like the maple trees because they look amazing in summer and spectacular when the seasons are changing.
$50 Bunnings Gift Card Winner!
[…] winner of the $50 Bunnings gift card from the National Tree Day Giveaway has been randomly selected – and it’s Sonia, who liked peppercorn trees, silver birch, […]
I just drew the winner. Congratulations Sonia!
For me, the maple is my favourite tree. My grandmother is Canadian, and from as far back as I can remember I’ve always associated maple leaves with her (and of course Canada!). They also give us that most beautiful of golden nectars, maple syrup. Pancakes with maple syrup are a regular favourite weekend breakfast in our family, and on rare occasions we treat ourselves to bacon and eggs on toast with maple syrup. Yum!
That said, I don’t have a Canadian maple tree and probably never will. The climate here is not right for growing them well and producing syrup. We do have a Japanese maple, which is pretty in autumn, but really not the same.