Deciduous trees are alien to Australia, their golden autumn leaves flagrantly obvious among the grey/green eucalyptus and yellow-flowered acacia.
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They were introduced by our forebears to remind them of their home, and in some areas, such as the proliferation of oaks, elms, poplars and plane trees that grace streets and parks in towns, and surround venerable homesteads, they have added to the appeal of the Australian landscape.
There is no better example of the acclimatisation of the English trees than the landscape at Lake Edward, Crookwell, where John Carter has spent the past seven decades planting the exotic trees.
And in so doing, John has formed aesthetic vistas on the family property as surely as 'Capability' Brown did during the eighteenth century in England for his aristocratic patrons, on their now famous estates.
From the tower he had built in 2002 to commemorate his family's 125 year association with Lake Edward, one gets a scenic view of the efforts John has achieved since 1954 when he planted his first English Oak.
Such has been the harmonic transformation of the property, on that mid-summer day on the Southern Tablelands, when mist rolled in from the east and it was cold enough to wear a pullover, John has created the ambience of an English county.
Pinus radiata planted on the contour to provide protection against inclement weather for the stock, set the scene for the plantations of oak and poplar placed around the property, while an avenue of elm leads the visitor to the Lake Edward homestead.
To plant trees is to have faith in the present, to express a hope for the future and as an act of reverence for the past.
"I've always been keen on trees," John Carter said when viewing his life-time dedication to planting over 40,000 by hand on his property.
He planted his first tree in 1954, an English Oak.
"In the last ten years I've intensified that planting," he said.
"I had read about the Dehesa in Spain and Montada in Portugal, where they had deliberately planted oaks across paddocks so that the pigs which feed under them produced outstanding pork."
John had also seen how his cattle always ate the oak leaves and acorns in autumn, and particularly during a drought.
"The cattle did very well and I also noticed the pasture under the oak trees was superior to the other pasture," he said.
Encouraged by those observations, John gradually spread the oak plantations right across the property.
He now has what he calls 'little woods' of two to eight acres (0.8ha to 3ha) where the oaks have been grown from acorns which he has picked up in the streets of Canberra and from a huge oak in the Crookwell Showground.
The deep rooted trees are now an established presence on Lake Edward, where John said they do better through a drought because of their extensive root network.
"They are very deep rooted and bring up so many nutrients from the deep subsoil," he said.
"Their roots are spread over at least twice and sometimes three times the area that the actual foliage has, so they are enriching the soil and they are fire resistant."
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John's family came from England, not far from Sherwood Forest in 1833 and settled near Canyon Leigh, where they built their first house named Sherwood.
"So I guess I have an affinity with oak trees, but they are only one of the many species I have planted - I have actually got 120 different sorts of trees growing on the place, including 14 types of oak, eight sorts of elm and quite a lot of sorts of poplars."
There have been many trees John has tried, but the oak and the poplar have been the most successful, and admits to losing as many as one-third of those he planted.
"Anyone saying that you plant a certain number of trees and they'll all grow is not aware of the difficulties - you get droughts, you get small fires, there are all sorts of things that can put you back a few years," he said.
"We've just had two very wet years, as we had in the 1950s and the 1970s and I think I might have lost three elms in the elm avenue simply because of the extreme wet."
That drive was planted in 1962 to commemorate the 25th wedding anniversary of John's parents.
Although his grandfather had left ten trees to the acre on the tree covered soils when he set about developing the family property in 1879, John believes it must have been fairly treeless in its 'natural' state.
"On our black soil flats, I don't think there were many trees, the country must have been more open because it was the first place taken out by the surveyor for a friend of Governor Darling in 1828," John said.
"There is an incredible amount of disinformation around, particularly as we are moving into the climate change hysteria, and to suggest that something has been the same forever just doesn't make sense.
"Nature changes over time and if you get too many species they start to kill one another through lack of light.
"To suggest the Aborigine were farming it as though it was an English pastoral scene is frankly ridiculous, it didn't happen."
- Further reading - Vale Ken Karsten