Our six year old daughter is very inquisitive. She’s at that stage where she asks a million questions and comes up with the craziest ideas. When we were arranging to get our tree lopped down by an arborist service in Melbourne, she immediately had to know all about it. We got onto the topic of trees and forests, and the whole conversation took some interesting direction. By the end of it, she knew all of these things you wouldn’t expect from a girl of six: about deforestation, climate change, and environmentalism.
So eventually we had to call in an arborists based in Melbourne. After a little research I found that they were very efficient and during the initial inspection they were straight with me. By the time they arrived however, there was a little someone stopping them from doing their job. There, sitting beneath the old tree we were having felled, was my young daughter. She’d set up a makeshift tent and had drawn a sign on a cardboard cutout which said “Save the tree”. It was so adorable. I can’t imagine what the arborists were thinking, probably that her parents are hippies or something. I quickly went over there and had a talk with her about what was happening with the tree felling. Melbourne is not in the forest, I said, and it’s okay for them to cut the tree in our backyard, it won’t hurt the forest or the environment.
She’s a bright kid so she caught on pretty quickly. I love the way small children have no shame. We got her tent and sign out of the way (after a few photos, of course) and went into the house. The arborists were able to do their job and because they did such great work we also got them to do some tree pruning as well. I have to say that although it was a bit embarrassing, I am proud of my daughter’s imagination.