Copyright

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

FIRST EDITION

© Jack Cooke 2016, 2017

Cover design by Dominic Forbes © HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

Cover illustrations based on photographs © Jeff Gilbert/Alamy; Shutterstock.com (textures)

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Source ISBN: 9780008157609

Ebook Edition © April 2016 ISBN: 9780008153922

Version: 2017-03-14

Dedication

To my mother, who has a great love of trees and a mortal fear of heights

Epigraph

‘Back to the trees!’ shouted Uncle Vanya. ‘Back to nature!’

The Evolution Man, Or, How I Ate My Father, Roy Lewis

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

The Inner Gibbon

A Short History of Climbing Trees

Green Fingers

A Warning to the Curious

Canals & Rivers

Brothers in Arms, Bishop’s Park

The Helping Hand, Regent’s Canal

The Hideout, Beverley Brook

The Old Mill, Ravensbourne River

The Crow’s Nest, King Edward VII Memorial Park

The Sidewinder, Hertford Union Canal

The Golden Fleece, Little Venice

The Double Decker, Millbank

Ophelia’s Treehouse, The Bow Brook

The Fireman’s Pole, Meadowbank

The Fish Hook, River Wandle

City Parks

The Divine Tree, Holland Park

The Kraken, Clissold Park

The Cracked Ash, Victoria Park

Twin Peaks, Victoria Park

Bristowe’s Oaks, Brockwell Park

Plimpton’s Seat, Finsbury Park

The Flagpole, Wandsworth Park

The Tilted Tree, Ravenscourt Park

The Two Towers, Ravenscourt Park

House of Marvell, Waterlow Park

The Enchanted Oak, Ruskin Park

The Quarterdeck, Geraldine Harmsworth Park

The Chartist Tree, Kennington Park

The Magic Carpet, Normand Park

The Guardian Tree, Crystal Palace Park

The Corkscrew, Battersea Park

The Strangled Oak, Battersea Park

The Totem Pole, Roundwood Park

The Jigsaw Tree, Burgess Park

Species

Squares, Gardens & Greens

The Wooden Rose, Brunswick Square

The Black Horse, Temple Gardens

The Chrysalis, Fulham Palace Gardens

Bishop’s Rest, Fulham Palace Gardens

The Nostrils, Camberwell Green

Pankhurst’s Stave, Victoria Tower Gardens

The Catapult, Lincoln’s Inn Fields

The Mountain Top, Horniman Museum Gardens

The Vanguard Beech, Lucas Gardens

The Amplifier, Canada Square

The Gelding’s Tree, Golden Square

Cemeteries & Churchyards

The Three Crowns, Abney Park Cemetery

The Angel Pine, Brompton Cemetery

The Split Yew, All Saints Fulham

John Joshua’s Lime, Hammersmith Old

The False Prophet, St John’s Wood Church Grounds

The Old Crutch, Kensal Green Cemetery

The Black Hand, Nunhead Cemetery

The Granny Pine, Paddington Old Cemetery

The Pulpit, St Paul’s Cathedral Churchyard

Royal Parks

The Hermit Hole, Hyde Park

The Pedestal, Kensington Gardens

The High Bower, Greenwich Park

The Royal Perch, St James’s Park

The Tree of Knowledge, Richmond Park

The Lookout, Primrose Hill

Houdini’s Door, Regent’s Park

Streets, Roundabouts & Rooftops

The One-Way Willow, Swiss Cottage Roundabout

Tramp’s Corner, The Mall

The Spire, Highbury Island

The Burnt Treehouse, Lillie Road

The Traffic Warden, Park Lane

The Flying Oak, Kensington Roof Gardens

The Soldier Fig, Stratford Greenway

Seasons

Open Ground

A Strange Vision, Peckham Rye

The Oasis, Blackheath

The Turnip Tree, Tooting Commons

Lamp Post 33, Clapham Common

Gwain’s Bane, Wormwood Scrubs

The Talisman, Wandsworth Common

The Commentary Box, Hackney Marshes

The Fallen Oak, Hampstead Heath

The Dule Tree, Wanstead Flats

Secret Gardens

The Bowsprit, Rosmead Garden

The Holy Holm, Lambeth Palace Gardens

The Widow’s Veil, Chelsea Physic Garden

The Prince of Persia, Kew Gardens

The Lost Dragon, Kew Gardens

The Peacock Roost, The Hurlingham Club

A Night Aloft

The Sprouting City

Branching Out – A Tree Climber’s Glossary

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

Introduction

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.

The Inner Gibbon
A Short History of Climbing Trees

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.

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.

Green Fingers

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 trees have been clipped and coppiced, pruned and pollarded, shorn of their bottom branches and trimmed to a fault. London’s councils and park keepers do a noble job of hair-dressing, often vital to the tree’s health but at a terrible cost to the aspirant climber.

How many trees I have longed to climb and left regretfully: the silver lime by London Wall, high among Roman ruins, or the soaring arms of a copper beech in Kensal Green, shadowing the cemetery. Walking through Ranelagh Gardens or London Fields, I look longingly at centuries-old trunks, bereft of a single handhold. All across the city, countless London planes elude the climber, their complex crowns arching out of reach above the roof line.

The first and greatest challenge is reaching the lowest branch of any given tree. This is the key that opens the trapdoor to the attic, and the toughest part of almost every climb is found right at the outset. In order to gain the canopy no method is too unorthodox. Grapple and grope, claw and haul your way in; I have used tooth and nail in desperate bids to ascend a coveted tree. Sheer bloody-mindedness will often prevail, and no true tree climber gives a damn about their dignity.

The greatest single aid is a tall friend, a running jump being no substitute for a reliable shoulder. Pick climbing accomplices of a sizeable stature and you’ll transform your reach, elusive branches becoming easily attainable. Elevated from my humble five foot seven to the realm of a giant by taller men, hundreds of remote tree tops have fallen within my grasp. Many of these friends have no inclination to follow me into the trees, but for every unwilling climber there’s a committed pedestal.

There are, however, benefits to climbing alone. Just as the solo walker absorbs more of their immediate surroundings, so too the unaccompanied climber. The triumph of helping one another into a tree is a binding experience, and I like nothing better than sharing a common branch with a good friend. Yet there is something sacred about being solitary in a tree top. On my own I’m more likely to escape detection, whether by man below or beast above, and there is no compromise over which branch to choose or how far to climb. Dissecting life’s problems with an airborne friend is a fine form of counselling, but the same can be said of a tree-unto-yourself, where there is no need to have the raw experience affirmed by another. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of walking: ‘You should be able to stop and go on, and follow this way or that, as the freak takes you; and because you must have your own pace.’ I have often followed ‘the freak’ into the trees, reliant on no other agenda but my own.

I do not want this to be a technical manual. The decision to climb a tree is spontaneous and every encounter different. Rather than laying down a set of instructions, below are a few aerial insights picked up along the way.

One of the principal advantages of climbing trees over rock or ice is that a straight drop rarely confronts the climber. Unlike clinging to a cliff face, a latticework of branches intervenes between you and the ground, offering a real (or imaginary) safety net. In high summer the leaves of a tree obscure the earth below, lessening our exposure to vertical falls. The ground is glimpsed but, climbing close to the trunk, a ready anchor is always to hand.

Use the natural geometry of the tree to aid your passage. Branchless sections often provide other means of ascent, burrs for leverage or a woodpecker’s hole, and some species have bark sufficiently hard and fissured to act as a hold in its own right. The way is not always obvious and few trees grow straight. In the course of a single ascent sloped stairways can transform into vertiginous overhangs. The climber must adjust to their warp and weft.

Exploring uninhibited by surplus clothing and gear is an essential freedom. You need nothing more advanced than the skin you were born in, and there are plenty of handy nooks for depositing briefcases and handbags on the way up. To further blend with a new environment, shades of grey and green lend camouflage to the climber, distancing the city below.

There are many advantages to climbing trees in bare feet. We were all born with splayed toes, perfect for balancing on branches, but our parents’ insistence on stuffing infant feet into footwear undid this great gift, narrowing digits and flattening arches. A short stint of baring your soles to the elements and the old connection between skin and bark can be re-forged. Adopt a kind of ‘four-hands’ philosophy – our ape forebears retained opposable toes on their feet for good reason – and remember that the lighter you climb the further you’ll go.

Climbing bare-footed is an altogether more immersive experience. Where shoes divorce you from the tree, skin attunes you to the feel of different types of bark and is well worth the odd stubbed toe or splinter. In wet weather a rubber heel can send you sprawling to the ground, and bare feet do less damage to the trees themselves. Sap is a wonderful natural glue and before long your naked feet will stick to bark like a gecko to a wall. If you must wear shoes in order to feel your toes in the depths of winter, don’t try shimmying up a trunk in a pair of snakeskin brogues. The espadrilles once used by pioneering rock climbers are an ideal compromise. With these you can judge the camber of a branch and still avoid slipping off.

Remember to be wary of dogs. Have you ever seen the way a spaniel watches a squirrel? To the canine race, tree climbers are objects of rabid fascination, legs dangling appetisingly from on high like a line of sausages above a butcher’s counter. Often I’ve crouched, paralysed on the groundmost branch of a tree, with ferocious terriers circling below, baying for my blood.

Climbers can also become predatory themselves. Watching people from the vantage of a branch leads to a hunter’s disposition; a feeling of omniscience arising from seeing all and yet remaining unobserved. One summer’s evening in Victoria Park, I found myself descending a pine after sundown. Nearing the bottom, I spotted a glowing cherry through the branches – two teenage boys sharing a joint at the tree’s foot. I waited in silence for them to finish and leave. After ten minutes, when they showed no signs of moving on, my patience wore thin. In spite of the very real danger of sending them both into cardiac arrest I sprung from my branch and flew the remaining ten feet to the ground. Two priceless screams rent the silence of the park and the boys fled in opposite directions, so fast that I never saw their faces. In my vainer moments I hope they still talk of the devil that dropped from the sky.

Whiling away an hour or two in a tree top, other awkward confrontations can await the climber on descent. I have gate-crashed picnics, ball games and baby showers, arriving like an angel of ill omen from above. Epithets given me on such occasions have ranged from ‘It’s a fucking monkey’ to ‘Call the police.’ These encounters are a necessary hazard of exploring the high land above London.

The more we climb, the easier it is to envy those animals better suited to the trees. Watch a squirrel sprint across the bridge of a branch before leaping with gay abandon over a bottomless drop. Observe songbirds, alighting soundlessly on the upper reaches while you sweat through a maze of branches below. We can spend many wasted hours mourning the loss of our primate dexterity, those biaxial ball-and-socket wrist joints and elongated arms with which we might climb higher and farther. But consider the less fortunate members of the animal kingdom, those poor beasts with no prospect of ever attaining the emerald heights. The horse, the hippo, the humble cow; what hope have these of escaping their earthbound condition?

Above all, wear your scars with pride. Nothing commends a person like a jacket torn at the elbow or trousers greened at the knee. Bruises and cuts from the whip of high branches are badges of honour to parade among well-tailored ground dwellers. Turning in after a day exploring the city’s trees, I once found my entire buttocks covered in a constellation of savage bites. I was eager to know what poor invertebrate had been stirred into such a frenzy of retribution. On another occasion, sitting down to a meal in a Greenwich pub, a cedar cone dropped from my hair into my neighbour’s pint. This wonderful specimen had attached itself to my crop by means of some highly adhesive sap. Although forced to swap my untouched beer for his now somewhat resinous brew, I was immensely pleased that a token of the day’s adventures had followed me back to earth. Stepping into a beech, cedar or pine brings us closer to nature than a thousand safaris, and has as much to teach us as an entire zoo viewed through Perspex panels.

A Warning to the Curious

Bonae actionis uir, incautius in arborem ascendens deciderat deorsum, et, contrito corpore. (A worthy man, having incautiously mounted a tree, had fallen down, and died from the bruise.)

Life of Cuthbert, Bede

In many ways you are never safer than when up a tree. The moment you climb into one you remove yourself from many of the city’s everyday dangers. You are, for instance, unlikely to be mugged at altitude. Pickpockets operate far below and, generally speaking, haven’t hung out in trees since the highwayman’s heyday. You’d be equally unfortunate to be hit by the number 91 from Crouch End, the five o’clock from Waterloo or a lycra-clad cyclist with a death wish. Tourist scrums, crowded streets, screaming schoolchildren: many of a city’s most frightening phenomena are confined to ground level.

This is not to say that trees are without their inherent dangers. What follows is some friendly advice, most of which is common sense. I want to encourage people to climb, but to do so knowing their own limits and those of the tree. The joy of exploring canopy is too precious to throw under the health and safety steamroller; climbing trees involves a managed risk and, with due care, we need not fall to an early grave.

It is easy to forget that what goes up must come down. In a fit of cloud-chasing exuberance you might shoot up a tree paying little, if any, attention to your return journey. It is always harder to descend; instead of springing up off bended knee you are lowering yourself on tired arms, while blindly feeling for footholds. Sitting pretty in a tree top, you might be sky high with confidence. Look down between your knees and this momentary elation can swiftly change to crippling fear. However high you climb, always remember the way back.

On emerging at the top of a tree you might get the urge to jump and shout, wave frantically and generally draw attention to yourself in any manner possible. When confronted with a panoramic view of the city and a host of tiny people wandering far below, the human ego is prone to inflate to regal proportions. I call this ‘king-of-the-castle complex’ and strongly discourage it. Not only does such showboating distract from the important task of balancing on a branch, but you are disrespecting the noble practice of climbing trees. If you had lived in prehistory any large passing predator would have instantly devoured you. In medieval times bored archers might have used you for target practice. Today people will probably just think you’re a jerk. There’s a lot to be said for silent appreciation.

Remember to take a friend, at least to begin with. Exploring with a companion not only drastically expands your climbing remit, as outlined in the previous section, but also provides you with a handy insurance policy. In the unlikely event of falling from on high and injuring yourself, it’s vital to have someone on hand to be a hero and help out. Lying at the bottom of a tree alone and in pain is not advised; you will only attract the attention of passing vultures.

Climbing trees is sadly no longer a national pastime, and in the city it’s a rare sight. Because of this, park authorities and other powers-that-be might show surprise at finding you dangling from a branch. There is no natural law that prevents humans from climbing trees but there are a fair few man-made ones. Many of these lie open to interpretation but you may not have an inalienable right to be in your chosen tree. Be polite and find another if needs be.

When in the canopy try to resist taking endless reams of photographs. Confining the sum total of your experience to the eye hole of a camera creates memories more unreliable than your own. The camera becomes the moment itself and the joy of the climb is forgotten.

The trees themselves deserve due veneration; they’ve all lived here longer than you. Ancients that have survived many centuries of city life should be allowed to retire gracefully in old age without the strain of climbers on their world-weary branches.

The trees profiled in this book are mature specimens. All are sturdy plants and, if treated with respect, should not suffer from your passage from root to tip. When exploring other trees to climb, it’s best to avoid those that are not yet fully grown. Rather than damage a young sapling, chart its growth over the years and return to climb it when you are both older and wiser.

Trees are host to intricate ecosystems with thousands of dependants. One of the delights of perching in tree tops is meeting a cornucopia of wildlife in the heart of the city, and your attention to detail is sharpened by focusing on every branch you climb. Bark-coloured beetles, lime-green aphids and tree-dwelling spiders cross your path. My former arachnophobia was overcome by an encounter in a horse chestnut, a large spider crossing my arm as I clung to a high branch, giving me the choice of putting up with it or breaking a leg.

Many of these creatures are easily disturbed, however, and won’t take kindly to your trespassing. Squirrels give as good as they get, but other more fragile occupants should be avoided. Nesting birds are particularly vulnerable and, if you’re climbing in spring, try to give a newly built nest a wide berth. Imagine if you had flown a thousand miles, spent a week courting the love of your life and persuaded her to bear your children, only for your entire home and progeny to be crushed by a climber’s clumsy foot.

As you ascend, new shoots may try to blind you or impale your armpits, but avoid breaking off healthy limbs just because they stand in your way. Trees don’t always submit to your will; a sprung branch or a slippery foothold might suddenly cast you to the ground. By climbing close to the trunk you give instinct a chance to save you from a fall, your limbs latching onto this dependable mast.

Nearly all trees carry deadwood. The seasoned climber is like a doctor with a stethoscope or an old tracker tapping the branches one by one as they go. Look for the outward signs: an absence of leaves, peeling bark or a difference in shade. The necrosis of a tree limb is not always obvious, so test each rung of the ladder as you travel up the trunk. Casting deadwood onto an unsuspecting head far below is like throwing a spear at someone from the third floor of an office block; equally, being knocked cold by a phone falling from a pocket is grounds for litigation. Take care when descending a tree that you don’t arrive to find a corpse at its foot.

Keep an eye on the elements. Nothing ruffles the machine of the city like a strong south-westerly. Try to avoid climbing high branches on windy days as they come under strain when bending in a gale. Leaves scatter, branches snap, and whole trees are uprooted. A sudden gust might unseat you from a perch and, unless you catch a miraculous thermal, it will be a long tumble to earth. What appears sturdy from the ground might not cope with your added weight. Don’t risk damage to branch or bone; batten down the hatches and wait until there’s a lull.

Never climb beyond your comfort zone. If you find yourself twenty feet up a tree with your legs frozen, your confidence evaporating and your palms wet with sweat, climb down. Involuntary tree-hugging, through fear not devotion, has nothing to recommend it. Remember, you are taking your life in your own hands, so value it accordingly.

Climbing trees is the antithesis of cotton-wool conservation; it is wilful engagement with nature rather than careful avoidance. We must not develop into a generation stapling ‘Keep off’ signs to every trunk, no longer knowing the names of the trees we’re trying to protect. If we fail to connect with nature in a visceral way, a day will come when we are only capable of feeding squirrels store-bought nuts from our car window. The seminal step of reaching for that first branch turns scenery we take for granted into a living companion. The experience of climbing trees, and the curiosity it engenders, outweighs any damage done.

Canals & Rivers

London’s skin is deeply sewn with watercourses, though many now conduct silent passage underground. The once mighty River Fleet runs invisible beneath office blocks, and the noble Westbourne is piped under London, confined to the ignominy of an iron tube. Like the roots of the trees, rivers have hidden subterranean capillaries, channelled and culverted beneath the modern city. London buried its waterways when they became a hindrance, and long gone are the days when we might have paddled from our front door to the corner shop. The rivers have become mass sewers, and tributaries that once served as transport links now ferry human effluent and the floating fat of restaurant and home.

Trapped and ignored, it is easy to suppose that, like the tree falling unheard in the forest, if a river flows unseen it has ceased to really flow at all. Yet these waterways are older than the city – older than England even. While their springs still flow, a thousand years interred is a fleeting moment in the life of a river. They surface in secret, running in concrete channels or narrow ditches, and a line of trees is the surest way to trace their covert passage. Where there’s water there will grow life, even if that same water is choked with plastic bags, shopping trolleys and sunken glass.

There is a strong compulsion to climb trees over water. Drawn to long branches above rivers and canals, we are imbued with a misplaced confidence, something in the brain associating water with soft landings and summers past. Inner-city streams conceal submerged dangers and still pools stagnate, but these are superficial deterrents. A tree overhanging the current combines the two fundamentals of wood and water, an elemental landscape in the midst of the man-made. These mesmeric haunts tempt the climber like few other urban spaces.

Perched over water, whether in the arms of a weeping willow or a straight-backed alder, networks of branch and leaf reflect upwards, enshrining the climber in a double image of the tree. The play of shadows and light hypnotises the most care-worn commuter as the water wages an endless battle to lick the city clean.

All London’s streams flow into the wide blue artery of the Thames. Look at a satellite image of the city – snaking lines of trees hug the great river’s bends, clinging to the water’s edge as if trying to escape the metropolis altogether. Some of these are being toppled by riverside development, while others stand proud, like the uninterrupted march of London planes that edges the river from Blackfriars to Fulham. Climbing branches over the Thames we hang over the heart of the city and, if we listen closely, a rare natural sound can be heard – running water.

Canals, brooks and creeks offer an alternative environment, tight channels shaded by trees whose roots thread the water like long white eels. The Thames forms an abrupt gulf between north and south, while these smaller, circumscribed rivers are fissures in suburbia, boundaries crossed by irregular bridges but numberless branches. Many species of tree crowd the long, empty stretches of their straight-sided banks.

When storms lash the city the old waterways show their wrath, heavy rainfall swelling their channels and leaking into our streets, bubbling over manholes and seeping through brick and mortar. Sometimes I long for London’s waters to burst their artificial bonds, purging themselves of their sordid cargo and making islands of bank-side trees. J. G. Ballard imagines such a future in A Drowned World, where the city lies buried in silt beneath a deep lagoon and a primordial hierarchy has re-established itself, rampant plants colonising the stairwells of tower blocks. Floating over a street still visible sixty feet below the water’s surface, the narrator describes the sunken lines of London’s buildings, ‘like a reflection in a lake that had somehow lost its original’. Suspended on the long arm of a London plane or in the tresses of a willow, it would be easy to forget a city ever existed on these banks.

Waterside trees are prime lookouts, places to watch canal boats, Thames Clippers, and the tide of objects lost to London’s current. Whether clutching a high branch over the river or perching above a creek, we enact a two-fold escape, climbing off the ground and then leaving the land altogether. Traversing branches over water allows us to cast off in our imagination; the current takes us with it on a journey, floating past long rows of riverside houses, shipyards and factories, beside green fields and long sandbars and then out into the open ocean. The climber is like lost timber, fallen from the deck of a container ship and set adrift.

Brothers in Arms, Bishop’s Park

Platanus × acerifolia/London plane & Ilex aquifolium/Common holly

An avenue of London planes runs along the riverside at Bishop’s Park. With their branches curling over the path, you walk under the arms of a cheering crowd. In season, great curtains of leaves cascade over the embankment wall, seeming to stretch out towards the river. Where these branches join the trunks, perfect saddles are formed for the climber.

One of these planes shares its soil with a holly. Hollies are well adapted to thrive in shadow and this one has made a deep impression, stiff branches embedded in the side of its overlord. I use the holly as a mast to step up into the plane, taking a seat in the elbow where the two cross. Beneath me is the freckled wood of one; all around and above the leaves of the other.

At this height the holly’s leaves are smooth, not spined, safe from browsing animals, although the only passing threat is an overweight Labrador. Shuffling along towards the river, I find that a holly branch has crossed the plane, rubbing up against it. The branch shifts in the wind, its underside like a flat tyre from the friction.

Beyond the footpath I edge out over the wall and the long drop down to the river. The tide is out and the sand exposed, a beach littered with lumps of stone from the wall and a scattering of flotsam. What looks like an anchor lies half-buried in the mud. Other pieces of rusted metal could be forgotten treasure or scaffolding; near the waterline the clay pipes of Victorian London are a scattering of white shards, roll-ups from another era.

A crow pecks on the foreshore at a flash of silver – foil or a bottletop – while a black-headed gull dive-bombs it from above. Leaves drift down the river and I make a promise to return in autumn, when the plane will shed its burden to make an armada on the water.

Retreating to the landward side of the tree, I see the branches are covered in lichen and the wood has a curious pitted appearance, whole sections with fossil-like indentations where the bark has flaked away. I climb higher and lean my back against the trunk. On the opposite bank the London Rowing Club’s slipway is jostled with cars parked at steep angles to the water, only their hand brakes saving them from immersion. Out on the wind-ruffled river, four women pull hard against the waves in a yellow scull.

The Helping Hand, Regent’s Canal

Populus alba/White poplar

Standing in a narrow corridor of grass by the canal in Mile End Park are two poplars. Behind them the single chimney of a Victorian brick kiln rises above a wall of graffiti. The chimney is mirrored in the canal’s green water, and drifting clouds join it in the depths.

The dried grass beneath the southernmost poplar is thick with crickets, a raucous mating song in the July heat wave. There exists a city all of its own in the shade of the tree, replete with ring roads and intersections among the roots. As I step into the shade, the building site beyond the grass fades to a dull rumble under the canopy’s thrall.

I stand on a fairy ring of carved logs at its base, staring up at the cut-diamond patterns that decorate the bark. One great suckering root passes between my feet – I can almost feel the tree’s thirst.

The upsweep of branches above me ends in great clusters of leaves, their contrasting sides of green and white giving a sense of motion, even without a breath of wind. I try to flat-foot up the poplar’s slope and retreat dispirited, having moments before fallen from the first branches of another close to Limehouse Basin. Drenched in sweat, I begin to question the merits of climbing in thirty-degree heat.

Then an angel appears on the tow path, a man in a hi-vis jacket carrying a spade in one hand and a lunch bag in the other. He watches me repeatedly sliding down the trunk, then hops the railing and walks over. I turn, expecting some kind of mockery, but instead he drops the spade and asks, ‘Need a leg-up?’ This remains the sole occasion I’ve been helped into a tree by a total stranger.

Up in the bole, hoverflies molest my hair as I shuffle out along the length of a branch until I too am hovering, ten feet above the canal. Higher tiers of leaves protect my scalp from the sun, but I still have to fight the temptation to dive into the water. A solitary condom drifts past languidly, and the urge evaporates.

A black crow alights ahead of me on the branch. Perched unmoving on the poplar’s white skin, it looks like a chess piece. Beneath it, Water Rat – a canal boat – glides by and the woman at the helm waves up at me.

On my way down I defrock the poplar of a plastic bag. Returning to the tow path, I stagger to the Palm Tree pub, a precious oasis in a landscape levelled by the Blitz.

The Hideout, Beverley Brook

Fraxinus excelsior/Common ash

Wandering away from the riverbank in Putney, I follow a small stream that strikes out across Barnes Common, wrapped around by a protective hedge of sycamore, oak, willow and ash.

Birds call everywhere along the brook and broken tree limbs twist in the wind, creaking loudly. The stream is surprisingly clear and, aside from a couple of beer cans, no rubbish floats along its course. The path I follow is bordered by blackberry bushes and great stands of nettles; in among these a St George’s Cross has been spray-painted onto the flank of a young sycamore, an unwilling patriot.

Further on, past a bridge that leads onto Putney Heath, a magnificent oak rises, stag-headed, with huge white coils of dead ivy wrapped around its trunk. The tree seems half-suffocated and bent out of shape by this creeping garrotte. The ivy’s dead hair is deeply cobwebbed and I wonder what kind of arachnids haunt the maze. At its base an orange ring has been daubed. Perhaps this is a mark of death and the oak has been condemned to be felled. It seems an unnecessary fate; away from the dead branch tips, leaves are sprouting from the tree’s thick limbs.

I break out into Rocks Lane Field and then back to the treeline where the brook lies concealed. Stepping into a hidden clearing, the bankside is a warren of exposed roots. I climb an ash straight as a flagpole to get a better view of this intricate carpet. Below, the brook is fast-flowing back out to the river and the sea, and the sandy bottom is yellow in the afternoon sun. Two seagulls wheel overhead before turning east.

This secluded haven is the perfect schoolboy’s hangout, a place to smoke stolen cigarettes and play cards. Where the brook disappears under Rocks Lane it’s worth turning south behind the adjacent tennis courts to explore the remains of Old Barnes Common Cemetery. In among a host of beheaded angels and fallen crosses is a stand of tall yew trees, shedding their poisonous crop of leaves on the dear departed.

The Old Mill, Ravensbourne River

Fagus sylvatica ‘Purpurea’/Copper beech

Crossing over the bridge from Coldbath Street Estate, I catch my first sight of the Ravensbourne. Although it passes through the arse end of Deptford Creek on every tide, the river runs clear in a high-walled channel through Brookmill Park. Alongside, the tracks of the Docklands Light Railway hug the embankment on their way south.

I follow a path along the bank and pass a mighty three-pronged plane rising from a lawn by the playground. The fat bole has something stuffed into a crevice at head height. Curious, I walk over to find a tree fungus spreading inside the trunk like foam filler.

At the north end of Brookmill stands a copper beech, hard by the riverside. I grab the lowest branch and struggle clockwise around the trunk, before lifting myself through a tangle of limbs. Higher up, a curling horn of a branch provides a useful hook to rest on.

The river seen from the air seems low in its concrete channel, running back towards the Thames. Lumps of wall from some bygone structure sit deep in the silt, and ripples appear around them, dragging against the current. On the far side I glimpse the red-brick vault of the James Engine House through the leaves, an imposing Victorian pumping station.

Brookmill’s ornamental gardens fan out to the west. The herringbone brick paths run towards a round pool with a fountain at its centre, the water conceivably drawn from the river itself. The park is deserted and no one sits on the red tubular benches that look like the requisitioned hand rails of old Central Line carriages.

Climbing as far as the branches will permit, I find an arcane symbol hacked with a knife into the uppermost part of the trunk. The pattern is impossible to decipher, more hieroglyph than 21st-century tag. I wonder how long it’s been here and whether this old scar has shifted with time, the bark contorting in its annual growth cycle. Lichen proliferates where the blade incised the tree, colouring the hewn bark a gaudy yellow.

Descending, I place my hand in a kind of double arch in the wood, one inverted on top of the other like the famous scissor divide in Wells Cathedral. The interior of the beech is a labyrinth and I slip back to the ground as if through a ball of wire mesh.

As I retrace my steps along the bank two morbidly obese rats cross my path. They bob out of sight behind a fence, off to pay homage to their king.

The Crow’s Nest, King Edward VII Memorial Park

Alnus glutinosa/Common alder

In Shadwell one winter’s evening before sundown I find a lofty alder by the riverbank. Dwelling in a corner of the King Edward Memorial Park, the tree borders the Thameside walkway and its roots ply the river water itself, seeping through the mortar of the embankment wall.

Ducking behind the park bandstand and a row of shrubs, I pause at the alder’s foot. A single long branch curls out over my head and I follow it to the point where it strays closest to the ground. I leap to catch it, and a desperate arm wrestle with the tree ensues. Climbing hand over hand, I try to swing a leg over the branch, finally gaining the relief of the trunk.

The bark above me is covered by a black film, the residue of the dual carriageway that thunders north of the park. As I climb, the river plays out between bare branches. The last light burnishes the water silver and sets small fires in the windows of Dockland towers.

Soon the ground has become nothing more than a glimpse of shadow, and the view is opening on all sides. I pass two bird boxes pinned to the trunk, then draw level with the highest balcony of a riverside block of flats. Resting beneath the last branch, I imagine myself the lookout on a tall ship. Perched here it’s easy to indulge in maritime fantasies, replacing passing Thames Clippers with the steamboats of yesteryear and the clear evening with a thick morning smog. The alder shifts beneath me, a rolling ship heavy with foreign cargo. I imagine sailing out to sea, perhaps in the company of Conrad. ‘We live in the flicker – may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling!’ So speaks Marlow, afloat on the Thames in the opening chapter of Heart of Darkness. He refers to the passing ages of London, the brief moments of civilisation between long years of wilderness. From the tree top the climber can envisage a different landscape, composed of nothing more than marsh.

I turn west, and the fantasy evaporates; the megaliths of Bishopsgate stalk the skyline and the Gherkin seems close enough to reach out and polish. Descending from my panoramic seat, I glimpse a commuter crossing the park, waving with one hand, a phone in the other. From this vantage all human gestures seem exaggerated and the man is just another player in the pantomime.

The Sidewinder, Hertford Union Canal

Quercus cerris/Turkey oak

Drizzle tries to pockmark the canal, a greasy surface film repelling the rain. As I tramp along the tow path, everything seems to bleed into the water. Behind the iron railings bounding the canal, tall trees stalk the fringe of Victoria Park: planes, willows and horse chestnuts. They stand to attention, upright and aloof, offering not one branch to the waterside.

I turn back at a bridge with ‘Arse’ scrawled across the arch in lollipop red, before catching sight of a great crossbar of a tree, a large oak growing at an acute angle to the ground. I hop the fence to take a closer look.

The climb is straightforward but the rain has rendered the bark black and slippery, and the angle steepens as I ascend. The oak’s rough contours create just enough friction to cling on, a good choice for a wet day. I slither up like a snail, chest to the tree, terrified of spinning under the sodden trunk and falling on my back.

Reaching the stunted canopy, I am wearing a merman’s clothing, a dark green lather covering my hands and jeans. The oak’s branches form a square border beneath my feet, perfectly framing a patch of grass twenty feet below. Level with my nose, a bunch of acorns hangs between the leaves; their deep cups are covered with overlapping scales, a hallmark of the Turkey oak.

Something crosses my hand and disappears into a crevice in the wood. When climbing trees I often get the sense that I’ve just missed their other occupants, half-seen creatures that burrow back into the trunk as my shadow crosses them. They inhabit vast sub-cities, beyond the realm of human sight and hearing.

Perched on my summit branch the angle of the tree makes me feel exposed, like being offered up on a spoon to some passing giant. Out on the water, puffs of wood smoke drift up from a line of canal boats, their owners conversing in signal plumes. A wide barge, barely contained by the channel, is pushed past by a small grey tug, jugging along with its helmsman half-asleep by the wheel. Rain begins to pool on my lap and I climb down to find my own fireside.

The Golden Fleece, Little Venice

Liriodendron tulipifera/Tulip tree

Two canals meet in Little Venice, and at their junction the clean-bordered lawn of Rembrandt Gardens drops to the water’s edge. Spreading across the southern end is a tall tulip tree. At the tail end of October its notched leaves are a cascade of liquid gold, turning the tree into a glowing tower.

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