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I've been emotionally connected with trees since the moment of my birth, which was at home in a snowstorm in the aptly-named Oak Tree Road in Surrey. The five magnificent oak trees which gave the road its name stood as sentinels between the built world of our housing estate and Bisley Common which was our nursery ground when we were growing up. I passed those trees nearly every day of my life for eighteen years, their dark arms casting a reassuring feeling of permanence to the whirlwind of youth. While everything around them changed, the oak trees never wavered from their stolid magnanimity. I climbed them, fell out of them, sheltered beneath them when it rained; they were our rendezvous point, our point of reference in an otherwise low and scrubby landscape of birch, thorns and bracken. And just as their roots penetrated deep into the dry, too sandy soil, the oaks' presence unwittingly crept through me like ink swirling in water until the trees and I were as one.

My childhood was enveloped by trees both joyful and fearful. My back garden bordered on to a deep pine plantation – a realm of such Brothers Grimm-style terror that we would never have willingly entered it, even if the densely-packed branches had called us forth with beckoning fingers and issued a personal invitation. To us at least, this was the kind of wood where small children disappeared. In all my childhood, and that of my siblings, none of us ever played there. I only entered once, for a dare, and got just a few feet into its cold embrace before losing my nerve, but its suffocating darkness impressed one thing upon me: that Nature – for all its perceived fragility – can sometimes be big and powerful. Compared with the open, unthreatening landscape of the Common and the domesticated, emasculated mosaic of back gardens, those trees were a verdant reprimand that humans can't always have things their own way; that, sometimes, the natural world can flex its muscles.

If childhood represents our phase of innocence, then my journey to world-awareness began starkly at the age of seven. Once again, the moment revolved around trees. Adjacent to the infamous oaks – and right outside our house - was a stand of magnificent elm trees. These were giant beasts with strong bodies, heads held high and their arms silhouetted each evening against the setting sun. But while the oak trees continued to grow strong and proud, the elms began to lose their vigour. Almost before our very eyes, they thinned and withered and then finally succumbed to Dutch elm disease. I vividly remember the day when the tree surgeons came to cut them down: I stood watching their last moments through the large front windows in my sitting room and tried to pretend I wasn't crying as my Mum vacuumed around my legs, the noise melding with the whining chain-saws outside. I remember that feeling of utter despair, of choking confusion and bewilderment that something so beautiful can be torn down and taken away – and that those trees and their place in my childhood would soon be gone forever. The sense of loss remains with me to this day but in those dreadful hours, I realised that Nature hangs in the balance: a fungus and tiny beetle can fell the tallest tree, and that humans can – in minutes – destroy a life that's lasted for generations...

Vanessa Collingridge

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