The difference between looking and seeing

By the side of the road from Sudbury in Derbyshire to Ashbourne, there is a lone eucalyptus tree. This is rolling country, small fields bordered by oak, ash and hawthorn. A eucalypt in this unlikely place stands out, its grey-green foliage so different from the more vivid greens of rural England, its pale trunk slimmer, its trailing swishes of narrow leaves more elegant, its thin branches more graceful than those of its stout and stubby British counterparts. You notice.

You wouldn’t if you were in Australia. I have driven through hundreds of miles ofeucalypts in New South Wales, forests of them — they are overwhelmingly the predominant tree — yet never really looked at a native Australian gum tree in the way that, as I passed it yesterday, I looked at this arboreal immigrant to Great Britain. I was put in mind of a hawthorn I pass on the road from Longcliffe towards Elton.