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(#litres_trial_promo)Streets, Roundabouts & Rooftops (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)The One-Way Willow, Swiss Cottage Roundabout (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)Tramp’s Corner, The Mall (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)The Spire, Highbury Island (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)The Burnt Treehouse, Lillie Road (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)The Traffic Warden, Park Lane (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)The Flying Oak, Kensington Roof Gardens (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)The Soldier Fig, Stratford Greenway (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)Seasons (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)Open Ground (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)A Strange Vision, Peckham Rye (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)The Oasis, Blackheath (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)The Turnip Tree, Tooting Commons (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)Lamp Post 33, Clapham Common (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)Gwain’s Bane, Wormwood Scrubs (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)The Talisman, Wandsworth Common (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)The Commentary Box, Hackney Marshes (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)The Fallen Oak, Hampstead Heath (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)The Dule Tree, Wanstead Flats (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)Secret Gardens (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)The Bowsprit, Rosmead Garden (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)The Holy Holm, Lambeth Palace Gardens (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)The Widow’s Veil, Chelsea Physic Garden (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)The Prince of Persia, Kew Gardens (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)The Lost Dragon, Kew Gardens (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)The Peacock Roost, The Hurlingham Club (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)A Night Aloft (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)The Sprouting City (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)Branching Out – A Tree Climber’s Glossary (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
(#litres_trial_promo)About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
(#udf41fb2a-f1eb-52f6-83eb-cd32609bd22a)Introduction (#udf41fb2a-f1eb-52f6-83eb-cd32609bd22a)
One thing we rarely do in the city is look up. Only time and weather seem to invade our thoughts as we tramp the urban mile. We may raise our eyes to coming rain or the hours called by clocks, but little else breaks our focus on the way to and from – our eternal quest for convenience.
There is another dimension to the city, a world far removed but close at hand. It is a place of limitless space and light, and a simple antidote to the crowds. When we escape into this realm our senses are awakened; we taste cleaner air and see further than the end of the road. Where does this unlikely utopia lie? All around and above you, in the lofty, green canopy of the city’s trees.
The city I inhabit is not so very different from any other. Like all cities it is sculpted from the same fixed matter: steel and glass, stone and brick. But like all cities it is underpinned and overhung by nature. Everything man-made is dug into the soil, and beneath the street a vast network of roots threads the land.
I have climbed trees in London, but wherever you live you cannot be far from a low branch. The location of a tree is not as important as the act of climbing; you could be scaling a pine in Glasgow or an oak in Rome. Trees offer a way up and out of every city in which they thrive.
There are an estimated seven million trees growing across London, almost a tree for every man, woman and child living in the city. They are as varied and individual as the human inhabitants, from hoary old veterans to assertive young saplings, and as a would-be climber of their branches you have a lot of introductions to make.
The premium commodity in cities is space – space and the terrible lack of it. A recurring bass line in our media is the ever-increasing rent to be paid for one house, one flat, one room, one box. London’s real estate has become inflated beyond recognition, yet the city retains a set of residents who enjoy its most exclusive addresses, the best access and architecture, and the finest views. These lucky few are not the skyscraper elite in their capsules of glass and steel, nor the sprawling mansion dwellers of Hampstead and Chelsea. There exists another kind of penthouse, and its occupants – the humble bird and beast – live in it for free.
London is a verdant metropolis, with more parks and green spaces than any other capital of comparable size. At whatever compass point of the city you find yourself, you’re never far from a break in the asphalt and a climbable tree. Step a few feet up and out, and you’re suddenly suspended above the crowds, alone on your perch and enjoying a fresh breeze.
This book aims to give the reader a new A–Z, one that runs from Acer to Zelkova, offering escape wherever you find yourself. It is not a survey but a personal selection, representing the very tip of a deep arboreal iceberg. Variety is at the heart of climbing trees, and I hope to inspire others to go out and find their own citadels.
There are, of course, obstacles to us claiming the city’s forgotten paradise but, fortunately, they exist largely in our own heads. The two greatest of these, fear and shame, hinder and guard us at all times. Taken together they form a powerful anchor that keeps most of us firmly grounded.
The first emotion is natural and healthy. Fear is the backbone of survival and no bad thing. It seems rational to look up into a fifty-foot oak, the wind shaking its crown, and decide that you are better placed on terra firma. Although we no longer possess the mighty forearms of our hominid ancestors, human biology still makes us remarkably adept tree climbers. We came from the trees and we can return to them. Starting small, you’ll find that oak, ash, pine and cedar offer ladder-like ascents on firm boughs. Your balance and agility might be better than you suspect.
As we get older and grow out of many childhood fears, we develop others. We no longer dread what lies beneath the bed, but those who once sprung off trampolines now fear anything higher than a stepladder. Mounting the kitchen sideboard or reaching to close a window we find ourselves suddenly dizzy, reeling at a sheer drop of three feet. In such instances vertigo is an irrational response. Just like the rabbit in the headlights, it serves no evolutionary purpose; fear is there to be subordinated to our willpower. The humanzee may overcometh.
The second obstacle, shame, is the harder to surmount. This is because it’s so deeply ingrained, a tragic part of our social conditioning. There seems to be a common perception that climbing trees is not at all respectable. Like so many precepts that bind us as adults, it’s ‘just not what grown-ups do’. Long labelled the preserve of children by the unimaginative, an adult in a tree is drunk, deranged, suicidal – or a combination of all three. We are denied the pleasures of the trees by our own self-policing, by the roles we assume in this protective and circumscribing society.
For a grown man or woman, then, climbing a tree is out of the question. No matter how much he or she recounts green-at-the-knee tales of childhood adventure, no responsible citizen would shimmy up a willow. On the rare occasions adults do venture into the trees it’s usually to impress friends and show off, which should never be the inspiration or goal of climbing.
Conquering fear and shame is as much about rediscovering our beginnings as abandoning our tame maturity. The adult measures enjoyment against the future, pausing at the foot of the tree, while the child lives in the moment. The instant that you value a new set of clothes over a new experience you have forgotten how to enjoy yourself. We must grow as children, not shrink as adults.
If you are ready to master these emotions, a new haven lies waiting for you. Before long you can be ten, thirty or fifty feet above your surroundings. It is an addictive experience, and the best trees can be enjoyed from their lowest branch to their topmost. Swing out onto a low perch and dangle your legs a few feet off the ground. Climb a little higher and edge out of sight. Still higher, and you will find different windows opening on the world below, a new perspective on the city with every branch you grasp.
Many are the poets who have stood in the shade of a great tree and proclaimed its beauty, but what they behold is a mere fraction of the whole. By climbing, we engage all our senses. The textures of different barks and the suppleness of branches that bend under our weight are a stark contrast to the synthetic nature of the world we inhabit at ground level. Pausing in a tree top we can tune in to an alternative soundscape, a world of subtle variation unnoticed in the cacophony of the street; the heavy sigh of a branch buffeted by a lorry’s slipstream or a full head of leaves catching the wind off the river.
Only once, in all the trees I’ve climbed across the city, have I found someone sitting in the top of one. The man I encountered was small, grey and smiling. He was at least sixty, dressed in suit trousers with his shirt untucked and a jacket and tie hanging on the branch below him. Once we had gotten over our mutual surprise – and I’d taken a subordinate perch – we began talking. This man was no great libertarian, no anarchist or antichrist. He was simply a lawyer on a lunch break having his sandwich in an ash tree. This choice, to eat at altitude above the packed square of the park, was not a radical one. To me this man was following the most natural inclination in the world – a desire for breathing space and a different point of view.
London was built on a swamp, and it doesn’t take much height to achieve a good vantage point. But there are trees in the capital where, with little skill or strength but due care, the committed explorer can climb high above their surroundings. There is perhaps no feeling quite like sticking your head through the topmost branches of a tree, pushing through a pine canopy or reaching for the last bunch of oak leaves. You emerge from a dense network of branches below to an open sky and boundless views stretching away on every side. Beneath, filtered through summer green or the bare branches of winter, are the passing crowns of people’s heads: blonde, brunette, bald. The ground is flat and clean, and the world about is round.
It is these living lookouts – and the thousands of new views of the city they provide, open and free to all – that are at the heart of this book. Office blocks shimmer through the fronds of a cedar, skyscrapers loom above a green crown and the long lines of tenements dwindle into the distance.
Trees deliver us from the banal, and reaching the top of one is like coming up for air and breaking the bubble of our timetabled lives. Their physical complexity, together with the courage needed to climb them, liberates thought and offers a wealth of natural knowledge. The treeline acts as a defence against the darker parts of urban living and the canopy is an inviolate place, a still room for reflection amid the constant rush of city life.
There is nothing better for seeing the world more clearly than removing yourself a little distance from it. So the next time the city overwhelms you, when you feel hemmed in or shut out, remember to look up. Escape is at hand, reprieve is at foot; you are never far from ascension.
(#udf41fb2a-f1eb-52f6-83eb-cd32609bd22a)The Inner Gibbon (#udf41fb2a-f1eb-52f6-83eb-cd32609bd22a)
A Short History of Climbing Trees (#udf41fb2a-f1eb-52f6-83eb-cd32609bd22a)
A house in which rain does not fall, a place in which spears are not feared, as open as if in a garden without a fence around it.
The Ivied Tree-top, unknown Irish author, 9th century AD
Not so very long ago you and I were both exceptional climbers. We breezed through the trees, living, hunting and sleeping in the greenery. Bridging the gap between branches was second nature to our ancestors, and they wouldn’t have thought twice about jumping the void to secure a good breakfast.
This continued for many tens of millions of happy years. Then, one fateful afternoon, we stepped down from the heights and began our life as ground dwellers. Soon to become the baldest of the apes, we abandoned the very thing that had sustained us for countless generations, deciding instead to seek our future on two feet.
Whatever forced this great transition, climate or curiosity, the outcome has clearly been a terrible mistake. We traded brawn for brains, opposable toes for stilettos, and sacrificed instinct and sustainable habitat for an intelligence that would culminate, roughly thirteen million years later, in the ability to doubt ourselves.
Even after making the era-defining choice of no longer living in the trees, our ancestors most likely returned to them in times of need. Where else would you flee when being chased across the African savannah by the larger of the ground-dwelling predators? Indeed you might only be reading this due to the climbing skill-set of your very great-grandmother, which enabled her to escape the jaws of various ravenous beasts (or at least those unable to give chase up trees).
But there came a time when we no longer needed to ascend to survive. The invention of fire, tools and, more recently, television has made climbing trees largely surplus to human requirements. Although a number of diligent tribes continued to seek food and shelter in the canopy, living exclusively up high became a rare lifestyle choice; those still clinging to the branches in the 21st century are few and far between. Our relationship with the trees has changed from one of co-existence to increasing exploitation.
In spite of our great descent, the lure of climbing trees has persisted. Throughout history, thinkers and dreamers have returned to the forest compelled by a shared ancestral memory. Trees bring out a powerful homing instinct in many of us and we gravitate towards them, a part of us, perhaps, longing to return to our former existence. The poetic image of the dying soldier comes to mind, dragging himself to the base of a tree before expelling a final breath. Trees remain linked to our concept of a life cycle, their death and rebirth analogous to humankind’s own measurement of time. The Green Man of pre-Christian symbolism, a kind of arboreal divinity, is an enduring mark of this tie to the trees. Living faces and hollow skulls sprout leaves from mouth and ears, a relic of our former union with the vegetable world.
If we search for tree dwellers down the millennia we find curious instances of men and women climbing back into the canopy. Consider the druids, most venerated of ancient Britons and the policy makers of their day. If we credit Pliny’s Natural History, one of their sacred rituals was running up an oak tree under a full moon to cut down fistfuls of mistletoe. Only the druids were permitted to climb the hallowed trees, a sure sign of the ancients’ veneration for this noble art.
In AD 436, a slightly awkward teenager called Simeon decided to climb a pillar and spend the rest of his life sitting on top of it. Although historians have immortalised him as a man seeking spiritual enlightenment, I think Simeon was following a nagging instinct to nest. Hounded by other lost souls, he chose to escape the world by climbing above it.
Simeon’s life up high inspired a cult of pillar-squatting Christians known as stylites, ‘pillar dwellers’; others took to the trees, hiding away from the world in hollow trunks or climbing branches to nest like birds in the tree tops. Early icons display barefoot monks perched happily in the canopy, with various followers bringing them food and drink. These men became known as dendrites, ‘people of the tree’, and most famous among them was David, more formally known as Saint David of Thessalonika. He spent three years living in an almond tree, nominally talking to God but also enjoying the nuts and the view. Spend long enough in the branches and you too may find yourself beatified.
Scaling trees was certainly still commonplace in the Middle Ages. The Fates of Men, an Old English poem of the 8th century, provides a fascinating list of fatal misfortunes that might befall your average Anglo-Saxon. Most of these we can readily accept as unremarkable for the age: being devoured by a wolf, being pierced by a spear, dying through storm, starvation or war. Some of the documented fates even have modern-day parallels, like the man ‘maddened with mead’ who dies in the Dark Ages’ equivalent of a bar brawl.
In among all this misery is death by falling from a tree. It seems an odd fate to include in a list of everyday dangers:
One from the top of a tree in the woods
Without feathers shall fall, but he flies none the less,
Swoops in descent till he seems no longer
The forest tree’s fruit; at its foot on the ground
He sinks in silence, his soul departed –
On the roots now lies his lifeless body.
The bard’s lyrical account of a fatal slip implies that a number of people could still be found hanging around in the tree tops. In those heady days several different vocations might have lured our forebears back into the canopy: drovers would climb up beech and ash, collecting leaves as forage for their cattle, and medieval falconers seem to have spent half their lives chasing wayward hawks off high branches. Plucky soldiers would also have scaled the heights to get the lie of the land. Before the advent of balloons or drones, climbing a tree was as good a way as any of spying on your neighbour.
Fast forward a thousand years and some truly remarkable tree climbers emerge from the 18th century. In the forests of France and Germany hunting parties discovered several instances of children living wild, subsisting alone deep in the woods. Peter the Wild Boy, who later became a court celebrity in England, was discovered ‘walking on his hands and feet, climbing trees like a squirrel, and feeding on grass and moss’. Attempts to capture him resulted in the ‘savage’ taking refuge in a tree that had to be cut down in order to catch him. A similar story emerged in the 1790s, when three hunters came across a boy covered in scars living in the woods near Saint-Sernin-sur-Rance. Again, when they attempted to capture him the child’s first instinct was to climb a tree, from which he was subsequently dragged down. Both Peter and Victor, the second boy, were found to be living on forest flora – bark, berries and roots – and seemed to have reverted to nesting in the trees.
Although their stories have a tragic origin – they were most likely abandoned as children – both boys demonstrate the remarkable ability of humans to survive in the wild and our instinctual preference for seeking shelter in the trees. During the course of their subsequent lives, unhappily paraded as freaks, they often attempted to escape back into the forest.
More extraordinary than either case is that of Marie-Angélique Memmie Le Blanc. In 1731, on the outskirts of the French commune of Songy, a thief clothed in animal skins was found stealing apples from an orchard. The villagers set a bulldog upon the intruder, who was said to have struck it dead with a single blow. Pursued by a mob, the mysterious figure vanished back into the nearby forest, swinging from branch to branch across the tree tops. A vengeful party was soon sent after the thief, who turned out to be a girl of nineteen living off raw meat and fish, and sleeping in the canopy of a tree.
‘The Shepherd’s Beast’, as the new marvel was known, spent the following years of her life sequestered in a series of convents. This sudden change to a cloistered living space and cooked food destroyed her previously robust constitution. Within a few weeks all of her teeth fell out and she was given her new name, redolent of Christian morality.
Unique among such cases, Marie-Angélique recovered the power of speech and was ‘integrated’ back into society, where her full story slowly came to light. She was found to be of Native American origin and had been living wild for a decade or more. Her return was considered a triumph of civilisation, and her restoration to speech a victory for rational thought. In reality, her captors had undone years of instinctual living, caging the most well-adapted tree dweller since the age of the Great Ape.
In the 20th century the number of children and adults climbing trees appears to have been declining down the generations. We already seem divorced from our grandparents, to whom exploring was an essential part of play. David Haffner, a climber from Coventry in his mid-seventies, sent me an account of his childhood escapades on the city’s outskirts. In this glorious 1950s tale of derring-do, a boy named Tom climbs a tall elm to reach a linnet’s nest high up in its branches. Thirty feet above the ground, egged on by his companions, Tom makes a desperate move, slips from a branch and comes crashing down into a thicket of elm saplings. Miraculously, he survives with no more than a few cuts and bruises. David’s story is one of many from an era when a ‘boys-will-be-boys’ mentality prevailed. For all its potential horror, the tale is a love letter to natural adventure and the antithesis of today’s risk-averse culture.
Another example of the generation gap is found in a curious American legal case brought to court in 1919. The lawsuit involved a power company forced to pay damages to the father of a boy killed while climbing a tree on common ground, through which electricity cables had been strung. The judgment concluded that the boy had broken no laws and that ‘courts further realise that children are apt to climb trees’. It’s hard to imagine a similar case today, when children and adults alike are more likely to be plugged into headphones and screens than found up in the branches. There are currently several laws against climbing trees in public spaces, and as recently as 2012 Enfield council attempted to ban the practice altogether in its parks and green spaces.
In spite of these societal shifts, it is hardly surprising that the impulse to climb trees remains strong; the art is lost but the memory lives on. Abandon a small child in the depths of a forest and, after much sobbing at their predicament, you might well find them up a tree. Walk through a city park on a summer’s day and observe groups of toddlers crowded around the base of tall oaks, desperately trying to reach the branches. Their parents, each some distance apart, will probably be playing on their phones. We are less cut off from our deep history than from our own childhood.
How then do we stop ourselves devolving from climbing children to earthbound adults? Happily, the damage done is only superficial and it is easier to discard the short years of our nurture than the fundamental draw of our nature. Climbing, we regress back beyond our industrial present, rejoining the scramblers of the past and retracing our ancestral tree into its shrouded pre-history. The hard surfaces of the city’s streets yield to an older kingdom, where tunnels of webbed branch and briar superimpose themselves on the human-built environment. Tomorrow, you can step out of your front door and into a tree, reclaiming a forgotten birthright; it only takes a moment to return over the threshold of the first branch.
My own journey back to the trees began on a day shadowed by storm cloud, the end of summer with a fierce wind funnelling through central London and sweeping all before it. I was working in an office housed on the top floor of an old terrace. The building faced Regent’s Park but a brick parapet blocked the window view, built to hide the old servant’s quarters from the high society of the day. Although we could glimpse a slice of sky, the park remained invisible. Our only other reminder of the world outside was a London plane that grew to the full height of the building, the tips of its highest branches scratching at the window panes.
That morning the weather had caused chaos in the artificial order of our office. Torrential rain had opened a hidden sluice gate in the building’s plasterwork and a river of water descended, channelled by the carpet between the desks into a great indoor delta. The building’s caretaker had bravely opened a skylight in search of the flood’s source but returned unenlightened. Foolishly, he left the ladder and the key to the roof behind him. When the office emptied out at lunch I seized my chance to finally see the view.
Stepping out onto the lead roof, I was nearly blown clean over the edge by the wind. I latched on to the skylight’s surround like a limpet and gazed in awe at the panorama beyond the gutter. Regent’s Park stretched across my entire field of vision, the summer canopy conjoined into a single roiling green sea, the tree tops looking like another world hanging over London. Everywhere, thick foliage performed a furious dance, the willow’s long locks thrashing against the oak’s Afro, the whole scene bursting with a life far removed from my own. In contrast, my desk was locked in a desensitised world, a static realm where the only movements were the twitching of plastic mice. It was a rare awakening.
In one of life’s happy coincidences I had recently begun reading the adventures of Cosimo, a little-known hero sprung from the imagination of Italo Calvino. In his 1957 novel The Baron in the Trees, the author describes a mythical Italian valley where the forest grows so thick that each tree interlaces with the next. Into this wooded wonderland the figure of Cosimo is released, a kind of 18th-century Tarzan. Climbing out of his father’s dining-room window in protest at being forced to eat snails, Cosimo disappears into the canopy and refuses to return. His regular aerial pastimes include reading and hunting, then later, seducing women and starting revolutions. He lives out the rest of his days far from the circumscribed routine of his former life. Over the course of the novel he acquires ‘bandy legs and long monkey-like arms’, returning to the physiognomy of his ape ancestors while cultivating a tree-top philosophy all of his own. He never again sets foot on the ground, not even in death.
Under the thick summer verdure of Regent’s Park, Cosimo’s ‘Republic of Arborea’, a land where roaming the canopy was as easy as crossing the street, did not seem so distant. I imagined opening the office window, five floors off the ground, climbing over the parapet and leaping onto the outstretched arm of the plane tree. By a series of bridges and ladders I’d make my way down and out across the street, dropping from the final branch into the elusive Eden on the far side. In reality I took the lift.
Five minutes later I found myself walking across the windswept park lawns. Here and there the branches of separate trees linked overhead, and I pictured Cosimo skipping across the divides. Although careful planting schemes displaced the natural wilderness in my head, the violent weather made rose beds and box hedges look as wild as an untamed wood. Before long the rain returned and I ran for the shelter of a pine.
Under the canopy the sound of the storm intensified, a waterfall now ringing the tree’s perimeter. Placing a hand on the lowest branch level with my chest, I looked up into the pine’s conical interior. Stretching far above, the crown seemed like a safe haven even as its uppermost branches swayed out of sight. Cautiously, I stepped over the first rung and out onto the next, the tree’s thick arms offering a fixed ladder. My confidence soon began to grow, and before long I was high above the park and sitting on a wide crossbar. Looking down on a blustery London from this new habitat, I felt strangely protected. To the south, the city rolled out beyond the borders of the park and, although less than ten minutes’ walk from my office, I already felt a world apart.
Returning to work, sodden and with sap-covered hands, I struggled to settle back into my daily routine. The material pleasures of city life paled in comparison with my experience of climbing the tree. Sitting in the storm-tossed pine, my whole body cradled by the branches, had awoken a dormant escapist. The four walls of my office were no longer protection against the weather but an insentient cage.
Weeks later I was still dwelling on that same five minutes spent perched in the tree, and every lunch break I strayed back into the park, searching for a new tower to climb. These brief interludes between hours of phone calls, emails and spreadsheets became more protracted, and my colleagues’ suspicions deepened. I would return to work with a head full of curling branches and feathered skylines, and when there was no alternative but to sit at my desk I searched online for traces of other climbers in the city. But I found none. The only men and women who seemed to scale the trees were, like Cosimo, the figments of others’ imaginations.
The history of climbing trees is composed as much from myth as recorded deed. Our memories of an older, entangled world, a life lived in the forests, express themselves across the full scope of our fiction and fairy tale.
Alongside Cosimo are other heroes who cast aside the everyday and returned to the trees. Memorable among these are Robin, John and Harold in the wildwood classic Brendon Chase, a band of brothers who escape the guardianship of their ‘iron-grey’ aunt and disappear into the woods for eight months, refusing to return to school. Hiding out in the hollowed trunk of an old oak, the three boys are enriched by their experience of living wild; making beds of bracken, swimming in hollows, stealing wild honey and climbing trees. The novel contrasts the daily wonder of the woods with the strictures of the ‘civilised’ world. In one of its most vivid scenes, Robin climbs a giant pine in order to steal an egg from a honey buzzard’s nest. The terror he feels in the topmost branches, hanging high above the other trees, is contrasted with the solace of the thick trunk and its rough bark. In both The Baron in the Trees and Brendon Chase, climbing trees is a way of resisting the constraints of society, whether the stifling influence of a controlling father or the numbing routine of a 1920s boarding school.
Many of our popular legends spring from the forest, the dwelling place of elves and witches, dryads and nymphs, and a whole cast of characters born of folktale, from Baba Yaga to Little Red Riding Hood. In this rich tradition, climbing trees often serves as a refuge from the evils of the world.
One of my favourites climbing tales is The Minpins, the last story Roald Dahl wrote before his death. The protagonist, Little Billy, ignores his mother’s words of warning and is tempted into the ominous Forest of Sin, a brooding presence on the far side of the village lane. Lost in the trees, he finds himself pursued by a terrifying monster of the forest floor, the notorious ‘Bloodsucking, Toothplucking, Stonechucking Spittler’. In desperation, Billy jumps into the only tree offering salvation and, terrified, climbs branch over branch, higher and higher, only stopping when he is completely exhausted. Looking around him, Billy discovers the emerald interior of a giant beech. He watches in fascination as hundreds of little doors open in the bark of the branches, windows into the interior of a miniature city, the realm of the Minpins. Befriending this diminutive race, Billy finds a self-sufficient society at one with nature. The Minpins even harness the flight of birds to transport them from tree to tree, and our hero leaves the beech on the back of an improbably massive swan, soaring over the dreaded Spittler and triumphantly leading the monster to its doom in the depths of a lake. The story is a wonderful enticement to children and adults alike: climb a tree and you will escape the horrors of the world, both real and imagined.
The upper branches not only contain new worlds but serve as doorways to others. In Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree series, every journey to the heights of this woodland giant reveals a different landscape, realms only accessible by climbing to the top and into the clouds. There are other tales of magical climbing plants and trees that appear overnight, from Jack’s fabled beanstalk to the enchanted forest in Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro. These supernatural growths are a refuge from the hard reality of earthbound lives.
Some of our great science-fiction fables also have arboreal roots. In Hothouse, Brian Aldiss portrays a dystopian future in which vegetable life has taken over the planet and all but a handful of animal species are long since extinct. The survivors subsist in the arms of a giant banyan tree covering most of the continent, battling against a host of vegetable predators. Amid all the ecological upheaval, bands of humans have reverted to a nesting existence, living in ‘nuthuts’ attached to the undersides of branches. When a character dies they are elegiacally described as having ‘fallen to the green’.
All these threads of storytelling are bound up in branches, and by climbing we pay homage to our heroes. Whether following Cosimo or countless others, we connect to a long and rich tradition. In cities, trees offer escape for mind and body, and we come closer to legend every time we step into them.
