Zandra Rhodes, fashion designer
I was born in Chatham, Kent, and our house was only a short bicycle ride from woods full of bluebells and celandines. No one wants to live in a concrete jungle: that’s why I’m collaborating with garden designer Joe Swift to keep more trees at street level in Bermondsey, London. So the blank brick 1970s facade of the – as it turns out, aptly named – Greenwood theatre is being greened and livened up with trees and plants, both native and exotic.
Trees, the largest living things on the planet, have always inspired me. In Mexico I’ve drawn banana trees, in India banyan trees and in California the native Torrey pines. Trees do so much to enhance our lives – not least supplying the oxygen that we breathe. We’ve got to be aware how much we depend on trees, how much we need them.
Brian Briggs, Stornoway frontman
I grew up in a wooded valley near Bristol. We’d go up there to collect conkers in the autumn and do treasure hunts on birthdays, and to get our holly and ivy at Christmas. We had a treehouse that was built by my dad, up in a turkey oak. It overlooked a lane, which meant we could hurl abuse (and conkers) at passers by.
All our band’s videos and photos tend to end up being based in or around woodland. We’ve done shoots inside trees, on trees, jumping off them and playing them as instruments. When I’m not playing music, I work in a nature reserve. It’s an easy place to escape to.
David Lindo, the Urban Birder
I loved climbing trees as a kid because it made me feel like some kind of creature taking refuge in the tree. It kind of unconsciously connected me with nature.
So many kids these days are missing out. I remember taking a bunch of kids to a small area of trees outside the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol, and I got the kids to put their arms around a tree to feel the heat. They had never thought about it before and said:“It feels warm.” And I said: “That’s because it’s alive.”
At the other end of the scale, I said, when a tree is dead, it is even more important in many ways: we are so quick to chop trees down but, in reality, a dead tree provides homes and food for wildlife. So, throughout its life, in its death even, a tree is a very important part of ecology, -a very important part of life.
Jackie Morris, author and illustrator
When I wrote Little Evie in the Wild Wood, I spent a lot of time going to the woods and listening. In the summer, the wind catches on the leaves, and in the winter it catches on the branches and knocks them together so they make this little clacking noise.
I’m now working on a book about the lost words from the Oxford Junior Dictionary, one of which is “conker”. Did you collect conkers in your woolly hat when you were a kid? Did you put them in your pockets till they bulged? Yeah. Conkers is one of the lost words. “Acorn” is as well.
Emma Lee-Moss, AKA Emmy the Great, musician
When I was a kid in Hong Kong there were a lot of banyans. They’re stunning. I think in some places they’re holy – you go to some countries in Asia and they’re wrapped with cloth. And you can see why. They look like nature is trying to speak to you with long fingers.
If you go past Lingfield in Surrey, you’ll find a hollow old tree that, in medieval times, they used to put people inside as a punishment. I can’t really think of it as a bad thing for someone to put you inside a tree for stealing bread or ale.
When my English grandmother died, we placed her ashes under a magnolia sapling that we planted. And it grew so huge. It’s still the biggest tree in our yard. It flowers until late October, November even. It’s a lovely, living symbol of my grandmother.
