Wellington’s Wandering Tree

On a windy Wellington afternoon, the after-work crowd spills out onto Lambton Quay—suits, sneakers, tote bags, the hum of buses and the harbour wind. Somewhere in the middle of it all, a saxophone begins to play. And moving slowly through the rush of commuters… is a tree.

For nearly five years, Wellingtonians have encountered this character—known simply as Tree—busking across the CBD and waterfront. But recently, the performer behind the costume has found himself addressing an unexpected rumour: that there isn’t just one Tree.

“Hi this is the tree guy here,” he wrote in a Facebook post on March 3.

“I want to kindly request the people or person spreading the false rumours that there are multiple performers for Tree to please stop doing that as it’s having an adverse effect on my work.”

The performer says the speculation has been circulating for a couple of years, often raised casually by passers-by who are surprised to see Tree popping up across different parts of the city on the same day.

“When someone’s doing something that’s in the public eye, there’s always going to be rumours of some kind,” he said in an interview with Salient.

“You can see me in Lambton Quay, Oriental Bay and the waterfront—and it is the same person,” he said during the interview. “I clocked how much I walked one day and I did 10 kilometres around the city.”

But the particular rumour that there are several people portraying Tree has begun to chip away at something he considers central to the performance.

“These rumours about multiple tree people have been going for about two years,” he said. “The thing that’s worrying me is that a lot of people have kind of developed a relationship with Tree over the five years.”

“More and more people are asking me, ‘Is it a different person?’” he said.

“The reason it’s a concern for me is it can remove a lot of the magic of what Tree is. That sort of connection people have with it can almost be broken immediately if they believe that kind of a rumor.”

For the performer, the magic lies in continuity—the sense that the same wandering figure is still there, months or years later, waiting around the corner of a familiar street.

“I have been having meaningful interactions with people in the city for nearly five years now,” he wrote online. “People are starting to believe that the tree they meet nowadays isn’t the person that was kind to them some time back and so some of the most important magic of my work is getting destroyed to an extent by these rumours.”

The most memorable interactions often involve children, who accept the premise of a walking tree more readily than adults.

“A while back an eight year old girl came and told me happily that she has known me since she was four,” he said.

“At some point young ones like her may think that’s no longer true, when it in fact is true.”

The rumours are not the only misconception Tree has encountered.

“When I first started performing Tree five years ago I was playing the Indian and Chinese flute,” he said.

“But so many people claimed I was faking the performance, I had to stop playing them and play saxophone instead.”

Even then, disbelief sometimes lingers.

“I was playing saxophone to the best of my ability like two metres in front of this gentleman,” he recalled.

“After I finished my song he came up to me and said, ‘Oh, is that a real saxophone?’”

The question surprised him.

“I’m a professional sax player since a long time, and I worked very hard at it,” he said. “I also studied Indian classical music in India for 14 years and was at the top level of musicians when I was performing there.”

Tree ended his social media post with “I think it’s best not to speak about other peoples work unless you actually know the person and can ask them about what they do yourself. Thank you for your kindness.” 

And it is this kindness that Tree plans on continuing to bring to Wellington, for many years to come.