The tree in changing light

In this book, Roger McDonald meditates on our unique landscape and its rich tapestry of native and introduced trees, which 'give language to our existence'. The book also celebrates country men like his grandfather Chester Bucknall, a forester and pine-planter; Wilf Crane, Roger McDonald's mentor with trees who flew planes across country on solo planting raids and whose death while flying inspired this book; and Tom Wyatt, a bush gardener whose dedicateed hands made trees bloom in Queensland towns. Here, too, are historical vignettes of a landscape husbanded for many centuries by Aborigines, yet swiftly and irrevocably changed by European settlement; encounters with poets and painters inspired by trees; tales of ordinary people for whom trees are talismanic; and interwoven throughout are autobiographical sketches, slices of family history and episodes from Roger McDonald's own life as a writer and sometime planter of trees.