Gang-gang. Woodworker pays 'Witness Tree' homage to Charles Weston

This wheelbarrow, entitled A Barrow To Push, is a work of art and it is by Tharwa furniture maker/woodworker/artist Myles Gostelow.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll explain that the wheelbarrow is on display in the Witness Tree Project exhibition at the Gallery of Australian Design.

Witness trees are venerable trees that have seen a great deal in their long lives. The various works in the exhibition are made from or pay respects to aged ACT trees that, when the time came to remove them (because they were diseased and/or dangerous) had their timbers thoughtfully preserved with a view to a sensitive, tree-respecting project like this. Removed trees are usually mulched but these trees' timbers were saved and and treated and so for example A Barrow To Push uses timber from three late 'witnesses'.

The three were, or are, a Silky Oak installed at Hargraves Crescent Ainslie in 1928, an Elm planted in Weston Park Yarralumla in the 1920s and a Claret Ash that from 1928 until recent times witnessed everything going on in Hayes Crescent, Griffith.

Myles Gostelow explains that "This timber wheelbarrow was inspired by, and pays tribute to, the early work of Charles Weston and the role he played in greening the nation's capital between 1911-1926."

"Weston ... was responsible for the planting of two million trees and shrubs in Canberra during this time.

"In May 1913 Weston started an experimental facility and production nursery in the area now known as Yarralumla Nursery. Weston also started planting trees in the adjacent arboretum (Westbourne Woods), now Weston Park. By 1920, 45,000 trees were planted in this area. There is every chance that the trees and subsequent timber used in the construction of this barrow would have been planted from stock grown in the nursery and aged up to 96 years old.

"They say 'time is money' but money can't buy time when it comes to growing trees. If Charles Weston could achieve what he did in his time, what should our legacy be for future generations? Perhaps this is our 'Barrow to Push.' "

Yes, and of course wheelbarrows, albeit knockabout ones with more sturdiness than magnificence about them, would have been important tools of trade of Weston and his tree planters.

The ACT Witness Tree Project, with the help of an ACT Heritage grant, continues until April 30 at the Gallery of Australian Design, 47 Jardine Street, Kingston.

Over the ages the ACT's Witness Trees have witnessed the comings and goings of oodles of Scarlet Robins (Petroica boodang) but now the species no longer seems to exist in oodle-sized proportions.

Our good excuse for running a picture of a male Scarlet Robin is that the fragile species is in the news ("Community key to saving robin," CT, April 5). The ACT Conservator for Fauna and Flora, Dr Annie Lane, is worried that the species appears to be in quite dramatic decline thanks to a suite of factors including losses of its woodland habitats.

And the species, an adornment of beautifully biodiverse Black Mountain, will hear itself being talked about in today's Heritage Festival Talk. The Friends of Black Mountain have avifauna authority, photographer and wit Geoffrey Dabb talking about the birds of Black Mountain from 12.30 at the lower ground floor of Telstra Tower.

Black Mountain throbs and bustles with the colours of bright birds like its robins and of its Technicolor wildflowers but nearby Lake Burley Griffin continues to disappoint with its uneventful drabness.

This column is always offering the ACT government and the National Capital Authority ideas for ways in which that dreary, watery waste of space might be cheered up. Here is our latest brainwave.

Why not, just as artist Patricia Piccinini was invited to cheer up our skies with her hot-air balloon Skywhale, invite Dutch artist Florentjin Hofman to Canberra to ogle our lake and then to create something gigantic and witty to decorate it?

Our picture is of his latest creation, his just-installed giant floating fish. It is bobbing about on ornamental waters at Wuzhen, an ancient town in China. Fifteen metres long and seven metres tall, it is made from 12,000 Made in China kickboards in pink, orange and yellow, the kinds of kickboards the world's children use in swimming pools when they are learning to swim.

Each floatie on the fish resembles an individual fish scale. And it is part of the method in the artist's playfulness that the whole creation echoes a plausible-sounding Chinese legend about a fish that followed the Yellow River and turned into a dragon.

Hofman would be just the artist to do something for our lake because he has made quite a specialty of watery creations. He garnished Hong Kong harbour with a gigantic (and bright yellow) rubber duck and in 2014 enhanced the Thames at London with HippopoThames, a colossal hippopotamus.

Our drab and woebegone Cinderella of a lake awaits the transforming attentions of its Handsome Prince, Florentijn Hofman.