When we parted ways with the big poinciana, it was a moment of sweet sorrow – warm sunshine now bathes the yard, casting light on endless new possibilities, but a friendly companion is gone forever.

Emerging like a gnarled giant from the back corner of next door’s place, its extensive dome-like canopy formed the troposphere under which a climate of fun times brewed – tyre swings and summer barbecues in the shade.

At 80 years or more, it was nearing the end of its life. Occasional branches would crash in the night. Its root systems where already cracking up the fence and threatening to cause structural damage to the neighbour’s house.

After careful deliberation, the correct decision was made to chop it down.

That was two weeks ago and I’m already used to it not being there. Fond memories flood the gigantic void left behind and already new life is putting up its hand in an effort to be noticed.

I sit on the railing of our back deck, sipping a cup of tea, rubbing shoulders with the pleasant autumn rays where once soft branches brushed the back of my neck.

A seed is sown in my mind and memories of other significant relationships I have had with trees begin to sprout.

The plum tree: I have written of this before, but it’s country Victoria and I am little more than three years old, playing the part of a famous mountaineer amid the limbs of a plum tree so large it kissed the clouds, as far as I knew.

Cake tins rattle from the kitchen and the waft of Mum’s pikelets carries to the significant altitude where I have made camp, warming me greatly.

Piles of leaves burn fragrantly on various nature strips down Crockford Street where my gaze is set to catch the very instant my father rounds the corner in his car on the way home from work.

The English’s tree: We’ve branched out to the southern Gold Coast – the volcanic red hills of Terranora, to be precise – where the old timers reckoned if you planted a feather you’d grow a chook and where some of my richest childhood memories took root.

Across the road from our family home through the 1970s lived Mr and Mrs English and a hoard of daredevil sons who we played with most weekends from dawn to dusk. A phenomenal tree in their front yard provided the framework on which most of our activities hung.

I am not sure what species it was but it was the perfect strain for us – challenging enough to keep the little kids out of play, yet user-friendly enough so its upper reaches, for those in the know, could be scaled on muscle memory alone.

Mr English was a carpenter, so there was always plenty of a material on hand for the building of huts, which were often perched on the most precarious of branches, in a nightmare for mothers.

Timber struts where nailed directly into its hefty limbs to serve as ladder rungs leading to the plethora of platforms constructed throughout for either sitting upon or stashing the “ammo”. Some afternoons it would rain pawpaw and mangos in some of history’s most ferocious fruit wars as rival tribes took on The Tree.

The eucalypt tree: Still at Terranora and there is a medium-sized eucalypt in our front yard. I’m sitting on the doorstep, kicking off my Grosby Dodgems and contemplating going inside to see how much Happy Days I can get away with on television before Mum reminds me about homework.

A black and white bullet catches my peripheral vision and I look up in time to see a magpie swooping low and dart-like across the ground.

Nothing too unusual in that, until it flies within the vicinity of the aforementioned tree, whereby Puss, the family cat, surprises all three of us, but none more so than the bird. From her secret ambush position amid the leaves, she leaps out and catches the maggie in mid-flight before crashing to the ground in a flurry of fur and feathers.

While not a fabulous outcome for the environment, it was more impressive than anything I have seen on a nature documentary, or anything on television at all for that matter, with the possible exception of when Fonzie jumped the rubbish bins on his motorbike.