From small acorns
Australian Women’s Weekly NZ|December 2019
Lynda Hallinan grows enough oak seedlings to plant a forest, then puts her tenacity to the test, stripping and restoring an old oak dining set.
From small acorns

The first tree I ever planted was an English oak (Quercus robur). As a chatty and curious child, one summer I struck up a roadside conversation with an old fella pricking out self-sown oaks from under the tree at the end of my grandparents’ lane on the Thames Coast. When I asked him what he was doing, he simply handed me a seedling in a milk carton and told me to take it home and plant it.

I subsequently found a spot for it on the edge of a fenced-off wetland on our family farm’s run-off block (where, fortuitously, my parents later retired). Three decades on, that tiny tree now towers over me. I wish I could say that small sapling has prospered into a mighty oak but I’d be stretching the truth a little. My oak tree is rather more mutant than majestic as, having lost its top in a wind storm, it now spreads mostly sideways rather than skyward.

Nonetheless, when I stand beneath its outstretched branches and stare up into that chartreuse canopy, I still feel immensely proud to have planted it, and I hope that one day my children, Lucas and Lachlan, will feel the same standing under their own oak trees.

This story is from the December 2019 edition of Australian Women’s Weekly NZ.

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This story is from the December 2019 edition of Australian Women’s Weekly NZ.

Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.

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