Sometimes I struggle to talk about what I’ve been doing for the past few years. There’s no easy way to tell people you fell in love with a tree.
It’s particularly weird given I never really liked nature.
In my defence, nature never seemed to like me either. I was three when we moved to the Australian countryside. Our house was a new build on a rough bush block. Tank water. No mains gas. The ground was raw and oozy. At night warring possums screeched and moaned and spat on the roof. It sounded like a bar brawl in hell. In springtime magpies grew hostile, swooping to attack. Every year my dad brought out the redback he kept in a jar of turps, making us memorise the spider’s markings. Reminding us of the dangers. We reinforced the lore. This one kills you. This burns. This blows your leg up until the skin splits open, if they find you in time. I worried earwigs would eat my brain. Wore knee-high gumboots all summer. One time, my sister accidentally mowed a four-foot brown snake in half. When we found the parts, the head was reared. Fangs out, poised to strike. You couldn’t trust the ground. The trees were no help. They harboured meat-eating birds and colonies of vicious ants. Bled sap. My dad loved it all. He painted modernist landscapes. Increasingly, his work focussed on trees. Burned, twisted, stumped. Ash blue and scarred orange after the fires. Lime green shoots, stupid with new confidence. I was too young to understand what he was really seeing. More to the point, I didn’t want to.
There’s a burnished, pleasing version of this tale where I, humbled invader, learned to respect the ferocious mortality of the Aussie bush but that story is not mine, I never did, I couldn’t wait to live in the city and from the age of seventeen I did precisely that. For decades. Years on, like a green shoot after my own middle-aged fires, I began a new life. In Somerset, smack in the middle of fields and woodland. It was impossibly picturesque. I no longer feared grass. I began to walk. I quickly grew to love a daily ramble (also we had acquired a deranged puppy. Walks were not optional).
But mainly, I went to visit a tree.
She wasn’t young. She was not yet old. She was a single oak standing proudly, stubbornly alone in a fallow field with only a disused water trough for company. She obviously wasn’t a she. Oaks are monoecious, but calling her it felt wrong. My feelings were instant. Epic. I wasn’t the only one. Quite a few villagers were into her, and the owners of the estate had obviously liked her enough to let her grow. Makes sense. From the outpouring of grief for the Sycamore Gap felling to all the poetry out there (I checked - there’s a lot), turns out we humans harbour deep affinity for a lone tree. I began documenting her.
As the weather drew in and the months passed, my walking thrived. I always paused to take a photo. The changes were fascinating. Something was always yielding, softening, responding. In summer she was surrounded by a blaze of ragwort and poppies, waving her limbs for sheer joy. Other days were miserable. From October to March she looked ghostly and isolated. It was punk as hell. She just kept standing - singular, anonymous, a quiet thing becoming more magnificent with age.
I paused to photograph. But I rarely stopped. I had never liked standing still, emotionally, physically or creatively. Had I ever really dealt with the reasons behind this? No! And now, I didn’t need to. I was doing long walks in green space! Breathing good bacteria into my microbiome! Toggling my brain into somatically balanced, sane equilibrium! In all seriousness, it was working. I was getting so into the tree, I didn’t want to leave (I’m here all week, try the veal). On work trips to London I felt overwhelmed. I sought out parks. Sat on nibbled, shitty grass and leant into the trunks of old oaks. I could feel myself changing. Cities were beginning to actively repulse me. So were a lot of other things.
After two years, we moved house. My oak affair was over. It was sad, but when I looked at my camera roll I realised it was definitely time. I had taken hundreds of shots. It had all become a bit obsessive and My Octopus Teacher-esque, minus the cohesive narrative and Oscar-winning potential. Even so, I missed her.
Months on, my youngest daughter and I stayed in an apartment that overlooked a square in Bath. In it stood a single, giant plane tree. It reminded me of my oak. I went and placed my hand on its trunk and told it I was sorry it was alone. I am not given to this kind of thing. I feel ridiculous chanting om in a yoga class, let alone having a conversation with nature. But I swear that somehow, I heard this giant plane tree witheringly respond I’m not. That evening I sat in the window, taking in the activity on the cobbles below. I realised: that plane tree spoke truth. It was the least alone thing in the world. People came up to it all night. Gaggles of Bridgerton tourists hugged it. Kids ran around it, couples kissed under it. It felt almost perverted to watch. Then the overdue epiphany landed: it’s a tree. Animals nest in them. Insects visit. They are in ceaseless concert with wind, rain, sun. Their roots are constantly engaged in the subterranean business of the wood wide web. This tree stood by itself, but it wasn’t alone. Nor was my oak. I felt a bit dim for anthropomorphising a plant. Projecting my biography onto hers. But I had learned many lessons and I had changed. I was grateful.
We left Bath. I decided this was the end of the story.
But some stories are stubborn. This one kept going. Beyond untenable human/plant analogies about solitude, and smack bang, sickening crunch, searing pain and the realisation that something is terribly, horribly wrong (there might be more original ways to describe a fall, but I am typing two-fingered and see no reason to mess with the classics) into an emergency ward. Where after an accident three weeks ago, I was left with an arm dangling lifelessly from its socket, shards of bone fractured from my shoulder and the possibility that I would not be writing anything for a very long time.
Then I met another tree.
One that wasn’t even real.
It was a picture of a silver birch, hanging on the wall of the A&E X-ray suite. I was in the worst pain of my life and high on more drugs than I knew it was legal to be administered. I barely took it in. I wanted more morphine and a working body, not another life lesson from another fucking tree. The staff took some pictures, like the before shots in an extremely horrifying makeover. Then they tried to ram my arm back in. Three times. Therapy has never worked for me but it turns out gas, fentanyl and a series of burly medics repeatedly attempting to put a bone into a socket do. It sounds bad, and it was. I couldn’t move. I could not help myself. But the people I love did. So did random strangers. It was kind of amazing. I screamed. I howled out decades of repressed pain and after I woke from surgery (I did say it was bad), all that pain was gone. Later, when they wheeled me back into X-ray for the after shots, I saw the birch more clearly. A lone tree, standing in a bleak, icy landscape. I will never know what genius, Werner Herzog-level hospital decorator thought to hang it in the room for the badly fractured and highly distressed but honestly: fair play. Nothing says sometimes all you can do is endure like a floor-to-ceiling black and white photo of a deciduous tree in the depth of English winter. If I could have saluted it, I would.
Three weeks on, my arm and shoulder are still pretty lifeless. The nerve endings are shot. You could stick a pin anywhere from my elbow to my wrist. I wouldn’t feel it. The bruises look like one of those old timey maps Europeans made of territories they’d never actually visited, which feels kind of apt. But I am not alone. I have friends. Family. Good collaborations. And my husband, who just told me that oaks become unbreakable in mid-life. It’s the reason shipbuilders prized them (and rather unfortunately cut millions of them down). Because they can endure the most treacherous of voyages. I can endure this. Root down, keep breathing, do what I can. I have to stop, or at least be very slow. I can only write what matters now, so it might be the best year I’ve ever had. In any case, it’s just one part of a far greater thing.
Growth.
