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.
Today, climbing trees seems to be a theme that’s fading from our literature, perhaps as adults and children in turn forsake the tree tops. Where still woven into fiction it is liable to become pure fantasy, as impossible as chasing dragon tails. Could this be the harbinger of a future in which, if we climb trees at all, it will only be among the pixels of our screens rather than under the power of our own limbs? I fear the day when we are so enraptured by our own invention that we no longer interact at all with the organic world. The instinct to climb trees may finally and irreversibly be erased.
Travelling around London, I find my grim vision alleviated by the cracks in the pavement beneath trees, where thick roots have broken concrete slabs and nature has outmuscled the man-made. Nothing gives me more joy than the sight of a water main ruptured in two or a new sports car crushed under a fallen branch. Perhaps there exists an alternative future in which the vegetable world reasserts itself in our everyday consciousness, trees becoming as prized as our castles and cathedral towers. All it takes is the tap of a branch to open our eyes to another world hanging overhead.
So it is also with trees, whose nature it is to stand up high. Though thou pull any bough down to the earth, such as thou mayest bend; as soon as thou lettest it go, so soon springs it up and moves towards its kind.
Metres of Boethius (King Alfred’s prose version)
This book will not tell you how to climb trees. You are, believe it or not, a natural climber, and the wherewithal to conquer nature’s scaffold lies deeply ingrained in your DNA. Rewind the clock to the first tree you ever climbed; can you remember where it stood and if it stands today? The intervening years may have stiffened muscles and added gut but the way into the trees remains open.
Not long ago I found myself stuck halfway up a giant cedar. I had struggled up the bare lower trunk, wrestling with a thick covering of ivy. Arriving at the first branches and faced with the final ascent, I found my limbs frozen stiff. A friend, who had already nimbly picked his way to the summit, looked down on me through the fronds with a self-satisfied grin. I had one knee balanced on a branch, an arm wrapped around the trunk and my nose wedged in the bark. A buttock was braced against another bough and I was bleeding from a cut to my right ear.
Climbing trees is an all-body pursuit that engages every part of your anatomy; it’s not unusual to find your forehead pressed hard against a thorny trunk, buttressing the rest of your body weight, or your legs locked off around a tree limb. The joy of climbing trees comes from their barely ordered chaos; branches balance each other, but every tree is its own bedlam. Getting hopelessly lost in this arboreal cobweb is the whole point.
Inevitably, upper-body strength helps. If you can do seventeen pull-ups hanging from the little finger of your left hand, then you have an advantage over the rest of us. The skill-set of a seasoned alpinist can be applied to bark but the novice is not ill-equipped. When exploring trees, the finer points of technique are subordinated to the haphazard joy of the climb.
This is a book with a strictly amateur philosophy. The closest many adults get to climbing trees in the 21st century is by paying for the privilege – even something so patently non-monetary has been ingeniously commercialised. You can be parted from your cash to be winched into the canopy, a harness tightened mercilessly around your genitals and a plastic helmet fused to your hair. With the overriding pain in your crotch, and your instructor swinging like an angry pendulum between you and the tree, there is little if any time for appreciating the scenery.
Such equipment might be useful for conquering otherwise unclimbable summits, the coast redwoods of Oregon or California, but the amateur goes into the trees as his ancestors left them. The examples in this book are for the spur of the moment, to be climbed with no other tools than your own hands and feet.
We live in a dangerous age in which some of our most natural and time-honoured pursuits have been rebranded. Swimming anywhere other than a plumbed and chlorinated pool and what you might have previously considered camping are now both given the prefix ‘wild’. There is no true wilderness left in Britain, so we can assume this new perception exists to distinguish between pool and pond, campsite and moorland. More disturbingly, however, the terms imply you somehow have to be ‘wild’ to partake. This could not be less true of climbing trees, an undertaking for anyone with the time and inclination.
In London, gaining a branch takes perseverance. Many of the finest specimens are impossible to scale with the simple gifts that Mother Nature bestowed upon us. The city’s