An evening like this, in the countryside, helps you to look up. Big cities condition us to look down. I lived in two big cities back to back for just three years, but it took me at least that long again to get out of the habit of looking down, and I only truly directed my gaze upwards on a regular basis a few years after that when, out of necessity, in that overrun garden in Norfolk I started to get more intimate with trees. Of course, that is what we tree-huggers do: our critics tell us we walk around in a daze, our heads in the clouds, unrealistic about what it means to live. But what is more unrealistic: being aware that trees predate us, that they are both more important than us and crucial to our survival, and celebrating all the joy and magic and additional life they encourage, or viewing a love of them as some kind of ditzy indulgence extraneous to the real business of survival? If you grew up in the eighties, as I did – a time of ruthless corrections to the flaws of the hippy era that were far more destructive than the actual flaws of the hippy era – you’d have often heard ‘tree-hugger’ being used as a term of derision. But there is nothing wrong with being a tree-hugger. Hugging trees is great. Even better is waking up the next day in a tree’s arms and telling it your dreams. I haven’t actually slept in a tree but I have climbed several over the last few years. I prefer the ones with moss on them, but it’s not a deal-breaker if they don’t have any. There is no left-brain thinking going on when I climb a tree. I am not at any point saying to myself, This branch looks a little weak; I’d better not stand on it. It all happens instinctively – probably because I have hundreds of ancestors who also liked to climb trees. Standing on the top step of a ladder and pruning my hedge, I am only semi-confident, a little untrustworthy of the metal rungs even though they’ve been built specifically to support me, but when I am twice as high as that, spread out along the branch of a mossy oak, high above the Dart gorge on Dartmoor, I feel entirely relaxed and secure.
Because I look up more now, I am also more aware of the small soap operas being acted out in the branches above me. For a long time I was conscious of the deficiencies in my knowledge of birds and would say to myself, You really need to make an effort to take more of an interest in birds, but when I finally got around to taking more of an interest in birds it was less because I told myself, You really need to make an effort to take more of an interest in birds, and more because a greater interest in trees is a sensitising experience that leads organically to a greater appreciation of birds. I definitely do not exempt the more common birds from this appreciation: the wood pigeons who sexwrestle in the branches of the hawthorn beyond my garden hedge for example, or the jackdaws and gulls who helpfully hoover up the food that my cats are too spoilt to finish. Two beady-eyed gulls circle above my chimney every morning, watching for the scraps I put out. Their surveillance is done from an almost inconceivable height, twice as high as the highest jackdaw flight path and probably a dozen times the height of my house. They probably think they’re doing very well out of me, but in reality they’re doing me a favour. I can put any kind of food waste outside my back door, return moments later, and it will be gone. Chicken bones gnawed bare by the cats, stale quarter-loaves, beansprouts, old jalapenos: you name it, they’re totally into it. I have the notion that, when the time comes for my ailing,
