Our Story

Not stock, but signatures. Individual trees, each one distinct, each one documented, each one the work of years — that is what this ground has always grown, and it is where our name comes from.

The ground comes first: a highland shoulder of country 750 metres above sea level, north-west of Brisbane, where trees grow slowly through cool nights and bright days, hardening into specimens that outlast the people who plant them. James and Barbara McGeoch, growers for more than forty years, chose it in 2002. They did not arrive as newcomers: behind them lay James's twenty-four years as managing director of Birkdale Nursery — the first nursery in Australia to achieve ISO Quality Assurance certification, in 1995 — and Barbara's quarter-century building its export network across the world. What they brought to the highlands was not ambition so much as accumulated judgement — the kind that knows when a tree is ready and, just as importantly, when it is not.

That judgement travelled. The farm's trees found their way into major council projects across Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, and further still — when Disneyland Hong Kong planted its entry avenue, it did so with 120 six-metre clear-trunked Phoenix canariensis and 150 Ficus macrophylla grown under James's direction. And in time the farm earned a distinction that mattered to us more than any export: it became the first farm in Australia and New Zealand to achieve B Corp certification, an audited recognition of how it treats its people, its community and its land.

For its first two decades the farm was known as Emaho — a Tibetan exclamation of wonder — a name that has since passed to new custodians. The answer, we found, was never the name. It was the trees, the ground they stand in, the practices that shaped them and the people who tend them. All of that remains with us. So we chose a name for what we had always actually sold: signatures.

Signature Trees carries everything forward. The Ravensbourne Estate still runs on renewable energy and harvested rainwater, and still feeds its soil with organic fertilisers alone — the practices that earned the farm its certification. To the highland farm we have added The Utchee Creek Estate in the tropical Far North, near Innisfail — so that our trees now grow in two climates, and our clients can plant with confidence from the tropics to the cool south.

What has not changed is the conviction underneath it all. A mature tree is not a commodity. A 400-litre Waterhousea floribunda lifted from the ground is one tree, with one shape, one history and one future — and it deserves to be chosen the way it was grown: individually, patiently and with care.

We invite you to visit, by appointment, and walk the rows with us. The trees introduce themselves.