The speedy creation of my Scott Morrison and Zed Seselja scarecrows is already underway. I have already shopped online for the Cronulla Sharks footie fan scarf to drape around my Scott Morrison's shoulders.

"In lieu of this year's Weston Creek Floriade Community Patch Scarecrow Workshop," Dr Paterson chirrups, "I'm working with the Weston Creek Community Council to encourage all Canberrans to, instead, build a scarecrow in your yard! This is a fun, creative way to build community spirit and to celebrate Father's Day a bit differently this year."

It is a kind of tournament, with scarecrowistas urged to send in images of their scarecrows. "Feel free to give your Scarecrow a name - this may help people vote for your Scarecrow," the MLA urges. No problem. My principal scarecrow will be called Scott Morrison and his deputy (coming off the bench if my front garden Scott Morrison is vandalised or stolen) will be called Zed Seselja.

Although I say "Bah! Humbug!" to so-called community spirit and although I have reservations about community councils (for they are much infiltrated by militant old NIMBYs) there is something pulse-quickening about the invitation-opportunity to make an effigy of a politician one dislikes. Rapture!

Some will say my use of a new, purchased, Cronulla footie scarf for my scarecrow is cheating (for the MLA's rules say we may only use recycled things found around the house) but surely it is wittily appropriate to cheat a little in the making of a politician, especially this Prime Minister who has presided over such shameless cheateries as the sports grants and car parks rorts scandals. My conscience is clear.

But wait! Calming down a little after my initial hot political spasm I find myself wondering how I can build a Scott Morrison that will be appropriately laughed at and ridiculed. What if, mistaking my purpose, people imagine I am a zealous Liberal and have made and displayed my creation as an act of veneration, of homage to a statesman I worship? If I dress my Scott Morrison in one of my old Hawaiian shirts will people have the wit to get that I am alluding (as many cartoonists do when they portray him Hawaiian-shirted) to the shameful way in which he went on holiday in Hawaii while his nation was beset with bush fires?

Oh dear. Making and displaying a political Morrison scarecrow is more fraught than first thought. The September 5 deadline looms. Leave it with me for now while I agonise over what to do.

Deeply missing the trees of the National Arboretum during this lockdown (and sure that they too are missing me, the breeze-tossed leaves of my favourite forests' trees whispering and rustling "Where's that delightful and intellectually-stimulating old man who usually comes and talks to us, even reading us poetry, several times a week?") I have been doing the next best thing and reading everything I can about trees.

This homework will enable me to be an even better conversationalist when the lockdown lifts and I am able to get back among the forests. I subscribe to some swish online journals of new science and new ideas and those journals report a lot going on down in the woods today.

So for example a tale in a recent edition of the online Nautilus magazine discusses the possibility that trees' leaves may enable trees to "see".

The science/speculation behind this is complex and we have no room here to do it justice. Do read the piece Plants Feel Pain and May Even See for yourself, preparing for your mind to be boggled.

And so for example a paper just published in the very scholarly Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences of the United States of America declares "We combine satellite data and atmospheric boundary-layer models to show that the wider occurrence of clouds over forests, compared to other types of land cover, implies a clear benefit of afforestation and reforestation ... which was previously unaccounted for."

What thrilling silvinews! We already know that leafy trees, with the shade cast by their whispering, rustling, brustling leaves, can lower the temperatures in our increasingly hot concrete jungle suburbs. Leafy trees may soon, as the world roasts, help make the difference between Australian suburbia being habitable and uninhabitable. Now the likelihood that massed trees may as well, in the cause of casting essential shade, assemble their own clouds, adds to the case for as much man-made, man-planted boskiness as possible.

The thought that Canberra's 250-hectare National Arboretum (parochially, I choose to think of it and refer to it as one of the Man-Made Wonders of the World) may (especially when it is grown up and its trees are voluminously leafy) create its very own unique-to-the-arboretum clouds is bewitching in the extreme. Perhaps these low clouds, a unique confection of the arboretum's uniquely choreographed arrangements of diverse forests, will deserve their own name. Why not, say, Canberra's Cumulonimbus or, to immortalise the name of the former chief minister who envisioned the arboretum, Stanhope's Stratocumulus?

I can't wait to natter this trees-create-clouds news to the trees of my favourite forests of the arboretum, although it won't surprise if it is not news to them but something they have always known. After all trees have existed for 300 million years while we, mere blow-ins in time, have existed for just 300,000.