David Webb of Fadden is perhaps the most recent Canberran to have a tree added to the Provisional Tree Register. His front garden boasts, shyly, an Acer rubrum (a Canadian Red Maple). The ACT Tree Register boffins fancy it will prove to be, when a panel of arbor superboffins assesses it, a tree of value deserving of the law's protection of it from all insults and injuries.

Of course David Webb's Canadian maple (remember that a red maple leaf is the Canadian emblem) is a very showy thing in Autumn but at the moment it is a shy thing. It didn't stand out at all in average street of average front gardens as, slightly lost, we cruised the neighbourhood in search of the Webb house.

But it is an unusual tree in more ways than one. For example although our city is blessed with some other maple species there do not seem to be many (if any) examples of Acer rubrum among us. David Webb was encouraged to think about the tree's rarity-in-Canberra when a Canberra-learned tree surgeon, visiting the garden to perform surgery on something else, was beguiled by the unorthodox maple.

But it is this botanical unusualness aligned with the story of how on earth this showy-in-Autumn Canadian comes to be in Canberra that made the ACT Tree Register people prick up their ears. It was presented to David Webb in Montreal in 1976 as a living souvenir of the Montreal Olympic Games where he worked for Australian television on media coverage of the Games.

On Tuesday and so as not to talk about it behind its back, we stood beside the modestly-proportioned tree, the warm breeze ruffling its exceptional leaves.

He recalls that all the Australians, athletes and media were given a little tree in a tube but that, having been given a little time to bond with it, the trees had to be posted to Australia where of course quarantine intercepted them. He recalls that his tree had to go to the CSIRO at Weston for a few months of quarantine and, he thinks, acclimatisation.

And within Canberra the little tree is already well-travelled. It has been, while little, in gardens first in Farrer, then in Giralang, then briefly in Farrer again before arriving in Fadden in 1983. It will never be dug up and moved again not only because it is now far too big to suffer that indignity but also because, when and if it graduates from the Provisional Tree Register to the permanent one, the law will come down like a ton of logs on anyone who molests it in any way.

Samantha Ning, Tree Protection Officer for Urban Treescapes within Territory and Municipal Services (TAMS) explains that even when and if the Webbs forsake the home and garden at Fadden the new denizens of the home will have obligations to look after it. Not that they are likely to mind. Their maple will bless them with a dazzling vermilion display every Autumn.

And yet, Ning explains, the dear Fadden tree is not exactly the tree with the leaf displayed on the Canadian flag. She has found that when the Canadians imagined their flag, to appease all Canadians they had to design a leaf that incorporated the looks of the leaves of 11 different maple species growing in different parts of Canada. The leaf on the flag is a masterpiece of political compromise.

Ning, love of trees evident in her voice, says that "we really want to encourage people to nominate trees" and she urges anyone who think they know of a tree that they think is valuable to look at the guidelines. http://www.tams.act.gov.au/parks-conservation/trees_and_forests/act_tree_register. She reports that at the moment there are 140 individual trees (the Webb's maple is one of these) that have been nominated. Then there are 31 groups of trees, including for example the lofty pines of Haig Park, haunted by the legendary, possum-terrifying Powl.

She enthuses that the Webb's tree, soon to be investigated by a four-boffin Tree Advisory Panel, seems valuable not only because of its rarity but because of its story, its Olympic Games associations for all of us in this sports-mad country, its connections with our CSIRO and its relevance to Canada's flag.

We know from a contemporary Montreal newspaper item that the growers of the little trees went to infinite horticultural planting and packaging pains to make sure they'd survive ordeals of travel. The Canadians made painstaking investigations of under what circumstances governments, like Australia's, would admit the charismatic little saplings. At the time the Canadian Olympic team's chef de mission Maurice Allan rhapsodised that they seemed the perfect gift for visitors since "Not only is the red maple leaf seen on our national flag it is also recognised the world over as representing Canada."

And so it comes to pass that Canada has an unlikely, shy (until Autumn, when it becomes a show off, a dandy) representative in a Fadden street.

Correction.

Blush. As many readers have pointed out, lots of them in triumph (for finding mistakes in newspapers gives some people an orgasmic buzz) Tuesday's column's bird photo was not of an infant Sulphur-crested Cockatoo but of a toddler Corella.