The Peppermint tree is a native of South Western Australia and in the older suburbs, it is often seen as a street tree.
When we first moved to Mt Lawley, there was a huge one in the backyard. I loved to climb it and sit in its huge spreading branches. From a distance, it can look like a willow because of its leaves and they way they droop, but up close and personal – they are nothing alike.
They are one of my favourite trees (though I have a feeling that all trees are my favourites.
So, today, I take you around the other way, into Mt Lawley itself rather than towards Highgate or North Perth. And I will concentrate only on Peppermint trees. The others will have to wait for another post 🙂 This is where I used to walk and run with my dog when I was a kid, around this area. It’s familiar territory, and the trees are like old friends. I mourn the tree in out backyard because it was chopped down and the huge garden is gone now, filled with a huge house that has no garden at all. It’s very sad and short-sighted.
First – street trees to give you an idea of the entire tree. Like many Australian trees, they are not the tidiest looking people 🙂
and I caught a wattled honeyeater on top of this tree – sadly with his back to me & before I could take another photo, he had flown off.
Leaves and branches. They are wonderful shapes.
details of the bark and trunks:
And the reason I walked this way today was to visit the Mt Lawley Cenotaph – the war memorial. For Australians and New Zealanders, today is a sadly special day: Anzac Day which remembers the thousands of young lives lost (when Australia had a population of 5 million) during the 1915 Gallipoli campaign . It was also the time when Turkey became the modern nation it is today – & Ataturk paid Australians a gracious acknowledgment of his success and the terrible loss Australians had suffered: Mothers, do not weep for your sons. They sleep with us and we honour them. He said something like that. There is a statue to him in Albany, Western Australia, which is the last part of Australia the soldiers saw.
This day also commemorates the Australians lost in all wars, as well as those lives lost on the Western Front in Europe in the first of the ‘wars to end all wars’.
The peppermint trees to me, with their gnarled old limbs at least as old as that war, because this is one of the oldest parts of Perth.
So – Lest we Forget. ‘At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them.’
Flowering rosemary from my garden is amongst all these flowers.
and a final photo of a peppermint tree. the shape just cried out for black and white.
mtlawleyshire 