The Tree Climber’s Guide
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HarperCollinsPublishers
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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)
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
Jack Cooke asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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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.