Oak tree planted near Adelaide Oval in 1914 first in world to mark World War I; progeny for centenary, France
Progeny from the English oak planted near Adelaide Oval on August 29, 1914, produced the centenary war memorial oak planted nearby (top right) by Adelaide city schoolchildren 100 years later. Through Adelaide-based TREENET, acorns from the original tree also provided oaks for the British military cemetery (bottom right) in Etaples-Sur-Mer in France in 2022.
Images courtesy City of Adelaide and TREENET (by Stephen Warren).
An English oak in Creswell Garden near Adelaide Oval and War Memorial Drive, Adelaide city, was the first memorial tree planted anywhere in the world to commemorate World War I.
The tree was planted on August 29, 1914, only a month after Austria-Hungary declared war with Serbia and 25 days after the United Kingdom’s entry into the conflict on declaring war on with Germany on August 4, also bringing Australia into the war. The planting was an initiative of the South Australia branch of the Australian Wattle Day League, founded to make wattle blossom (acacia sp.) Australia’s national emblem.
At the August 29 ceremony, South Australian governor Henry Galway planted the young oak, quercus robur, in Creswell Garden near the southeast side of Adelaide Oval. The Register newspaper described the ceremony with metropolitan Boy Scouts, “trim and erect”, forming a guard of honour with the drum and pipe bands of the East Adelaide and Thebarton public schools, for the arrival of the governor who was greeted by Wattle Day League state and federal president W.J. Sowden and Adelaide branch vice president Herbert Solomon. Eight wattles of various species, symbolising the eight states and territories of the young Australian commonwealth of Australia, were also placed in different parts of the gardens, supervised by city gardener A.W. Pelzer.
The wattle trees were lost later but the oak, with a life expectancy of 500 years, had a canopy of about 30 metres diameter when it was placed (with its founding plaque) on the South Australian state heritage register in 2013. The next year, on August 29, 2014, 100 children from the Gilles Street and Sturt primary schools in Adelaide city were at the planting of the centenary war memorial oak from a seedling grown from an acorn of the original oak, about 150 metres away, near Adelaide Oval.
Founder and organiser of the centenary was David Lawry from TREENET, an Adelaide-based national urban tree research and education cluster. Lawry also led TREENET Avenues of Honour 1915-2015 project to document, preserve and reinstate the original 567 tree avenues of honour across Australia to mark the centenary of World War I.
From 2009, TREENET collected acorns from the war memorial oak at Creswell Garden to produce offspring to plant in new or restored avenues of honour. Fifty war memorial oaks were successfully propagated. The first of these was planted on November 11, 2012, at Malvern Uniting Church in Adelaide, followed by the war memorial centenary oak at Creswell Garden near Adelaide Oval in 2014.
Another collection of acorns from the 1914 oak was shipped to a nursery in France in 2019 to feature in the landscape of the British military cemetery in Etaples-Sur-Mer where 464 Australian World War I diggers were buried. The first of these young pedigree oaks were planted at the cemetery by Gillian Bird, Australia’s ambassador to France, on May 14, 2022.