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Good morning.

I hadn’t a moment’s hesitation. As soon as this programme invited us to think of our favourite tree, my mind went straight back to childhood. Not a grand tree or a large one; not rare, useful or particularly stunning. It didn’t even produce the magnificent shiny conkers of its far more impressive taller brothers, which lined the avenue in the school where I was raised and spawned a thousand contests with my playmates.

But my tree: an ordinary pink chestnut.

I was brought up in Cambridge so, as my husband later observed, assumed the exceptional to be the norm. My father seemed a nonentity to me: my two closest friends’ fathers were knighted; children my parents taught had names like Huxley and Keynes. Compared to them we were nobodies.
But, Like my unassuming tree, my parents represented security and happiness. Not until my mother’s funeral and the decade caring for my father, did I realise how far their love had spread, as their former pupils beat a grateful homage to our door. Plant and parents both were part of that blissful time.
When my father came home with a wooden swing and hung its ropes from my tree, I climbed the fence, sat on it and let go… again and again.

A time evoked for me by Thomas Hood’s poem

I remember, I remember,
Where I was used to swing,
And thought the air must rush as fresh
To swallows on the wing;
The poet’s innocent happiness was just like mine. Even his garden like ours. But he continues:
My spirit flew in feathers then,
That is so heavy now.

I didn’t understand the poem’s darker side. All that comes with age and sorrow.

The Old English Christian poem, The Dream of the Rood, (or pole) describes a conversation the poet has with a tree felled for a terrible purpose: to become the gallows of torture and execution. In losing its own life the tree identifies with the One crucified, as it too is pierced with nails and soaked in blood.

But the tree’s suffering ultimately transforms it into an object of glory, a magnificent jewelled crucifix, proclaiming the hope of salvation to all. By dying, it brings life for ever.

Of course I’d love to be that carefree child again, swishing blithely through the leaves! But like the tree, through blood and agony our lives can also become gilded with far richer meaning and rubied with eternal significance.

I believe, sadly, my pink chestnut is gone: a victim to progress and tarmac. But the tree of life lives on.

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