Children and Trees

I may be influenced by personal associations but I think trees should be part of everyone's childhood. Looking back on my own, much of it seems to have been spent in trees of one kind or another and this helped to cement a respect for the natural world. Actually being in a tree meant you were part of something outside the merely human world, and seeing things as a bird or other creature sees things. So my view that every child should have a chance to climb trees stems from this.

Yet somehow there's a corner of the public consciousness that sees this as unacceptably risky. Isolated incidents of boys fatally falling out of trees while getting conkers have given rise to scare headlines in local newspapers and of course nobody should dream of walking beneath a tree without looking up to see if a thunderstorm is imminent.

The easiest trees for climbing are those which send out horizontal boughs when fairly young. Oak is a good example. Another tree that can sometimes be rewarding for children is hawthorn. Obviously thorns have to be contended with but there's often a quirky world inside a hawthorn not found elsewhere.