Poet and distinguished US professor of biology Professor David Haskell urges us to pay more attention to trees. He says that new scientific techniques are enabling us to see that they are infinitely more wise and complex and mystical than we ever dreamed they were. He wants us to imitate the ways in which he visits notable trees to "sit down, shut up, and listen, to see what I'm learning [from the tree and its surroundings]".

Hearing the professor say this on ABC radio early last week (he is doing the rounds to promote his new book (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors) I went out to sit down and listen to some of Canberra's significant trees. I began by going to sit down and listen to what may be Canberra's oldest tree.

Canberra's most ancient trees are thought to be some Yellow Box (Eucalyptus melliodora) methuselahs high up in the Tuggeranong Hill Nature Reserve, high above Theodore. The oldest of them are imagined to be perhaps 500 years old. They probably were up and flowering and providing shade for bunyips (now extinct in our region) and perches for magpies to sing from in the times (the 1660s) when Rembrandt was painting his ruthlessly self-honest self-portraits as an ugly old codger with a nose like a potato.

I hadn't been to see these Theodore trees for perhaps 30 years. I went up to the most venerable-looking of them. Like me, for I am in my 70s now, the tree is just alive but (again, like me) is gnarled, ravaged and splintered.

And, alas, (Dr Haskell doesn't say if this ever happens to him) the tree had nothing to say to me. I itched to seek its opinions on current affairs, on Donald Trump, say, or on the Turnbull government's Canberra-bruising decentralisation of the public service. But I sensed the tree would think these things too trivial to bother with. It was already a chunky tree in 1789 when the first US president was sworn in. It was already a statuesque eucalypt when the federal capital city was first imagined.

I felt like a pesky young trespasser intruding on the privacy of a hermit philosopher who wanted to be left alone to dwell on Deep Things. Apologising, I scuttled back to my Barina parked on a street in select Upper Theodore.

Later, still determined to listen to a wise tree, I went to my spiritual home, the heritage-listed Reid Tennis Club. Founded in 1928, the club's surrounds are tree-blessed. Some of the blessings are aged examples of the unusual and decorative Irish Strawberry tree Arbutus unedo. These trees (the species is enthused about in Lindsay Pryor's Trees in Canberra) may be almost as old as the club itself. The trees' fruits look, if you use your imagination, like small strawberries.

I sat down with one of the more senior Irish Strawberries. Talkative, it reminisced to me about all the tennis it has seen over the years and of tennis in the olden days.

"You're kidding!" I gasped in amazement, and marvelled "Surely you're having me on, Irish trickster?" as he told me amazing stories of how in those olden days new tennis balls came in cardboard boxes and were white, of how all tennis racquets were made of wood and of how night tennis was played by gaslight with the club's lamps lit by the Canberra lamplighter who went around on a penny-farthing bicycle, of how the romantic gaslight commixed with the sensual thrills of mixed doubles were so often the springboard for adultery. He says that even tennis-playing Bishops and Cabinet ministers (he told me their famous names but I am choosing not to disclose them, just yet) were caught up in this 'Anyone for tennis?' lubriciousness.

Dr Haskell is very reverent about trees and never imagines that they will ever tell us lies - and so I suppose everything Reid's dear old Strawberry says (except of course the ludicrous tall story of tennis racquets once being made from wood) must be true.