Dark clouds squat above the ridge. Below it, where the land drops away into a sea of fields and farmsteads, we mill around the car—a wind-blasted family forcing arms into flapping anoraks, wrangling small children into wellies, assembling picnic blankets, dashing after the pushchair as it careens under full-sail across the carpark. Then the skies open into a knife-sharp downpour, and we admit defeat. In the chaotic scramble back into the vehicle, one small figure stands firm. 

“Not yet,” says my three-year-old niece. “I want to visit the special tree.” And she pulls up her hood and sets off up the path.

The path takes the three-year-old through a kissing gate, and a knot of silver birches whose leaves whip a shivering symphony around her. I follow at a distance. She comes to a meadow, bare of flowers now in the dog days of summer, where tangles of teasles sway in the gale and the rain batters the sun-scorched, seed-heavy grasses. She’s a tiny figure in a yellow sou’wester and duck-faced wellies, bending her head against the deluge as she stomps up the path. She walks with purpose, yet takes her time, stooping to inspect snails and gnarled devil’s toenails, the fossilised remnants of long-dry lakes. She putters on towards the planted trees, past adolescent field oaks and goat willows, hawthorns and alders, and comes to a stop next to a gangly field maple. The first of its leaves and whirligig seeds are already tinged with gold and pink. She studies it quietly for a few moments, then turns her face up to me. 

“It’s for Dick,” she says conversationally, slipping her damp hand into mine. “He’s not around anymore, you know.”

•••

The three-year-old never knew Dick. He would have been her grandfather; he was her mother’s father, and my father. He took his life over a decade ago. My sister has wrestled with how to make him a part of his grandchildren’s world without having the relationship to back it up. The special tree helps with that.

Back when we planted the field maple, only a handful of months had passed since his harvest-time death. His grave was still a mound of bare clods, waiting to settle; we were still chest-deep in the scorched earth of immediate, furious, bewildered grief. We’d chosen to bury him in the natural burial ground in the lee of a long ridge called Edge Hill, beneath an incline they call Sun Rising. I wanted to believe the name was a promise of hope and eventual healing, but it felt like mockery at the time. 

On the day of the tree planting, the sun had hardly bothered to rise at all. It was nearing the shortest day (trees planted before Christmas tend to do better, they said), and the light was drab and leaden. Above us, a kestrel kited and keened, dipping under the air currents and quivering in statis. The burial ground was an unremarkable ryegrass field, then. Just a few handfuls of spindly memorial trees had been planted, each with a patch of bare earth beside it, each with a small slate name-plaque at its foot. The site had only been opened a few years before. We had to take on trust the woodland it would become.

We’d chosen for Dad one of the border plots between a planned woodland copse and the open wildflower grassland, next to a crab apple on the grave of someone called Gladys. 

“You’ve chosen a lovely tree for the spot,” the groundworker said. “Field maples do well on the edge—they don’t mind being a bit unbalanced.”

•••

Is it appropriate to choose a tree that can cope with being unbalanced to commemorate someone who ultimately couldn’t? Dad experienced life as a dizzying sequence of peaks and troughs, delights and despairs, swells and eddies for which he had no reliable rudder and no life-jacket. He told me that he had always felt rootless, that his grip on the world and his place in it was fragile and brittle, that he was often struggling to cling on. But field maples thrive on the edge, so maybe we’re cultivating a happy ending for him—and for us. Besides which, Dad loved the edges of places, the borders and boundaries that stitch the world together.

The Edge Hill escarpment is the borderland between Warwickshire and Oxfordshire in the rural Midlands of England—pretty low-stakes as borders go, but Dad found even the most parochial boundary inexhaustibly fascinating. From as early as I can remember, I was taken on long border walks with Dad. He’d stride ahead with his much longer legs, leaving me to battle the mountainous tussocks of grass and the sticky clods of clay that turned my boots into elephants’ feet. “Wait for me!” I’d bleat once my strength was sapped, and he’d turn back to kick me free from the mud and envelop me in his arms. Then onwards—tramping paths that followed the streams, ridges, ditches, fences, and walls of the shire border, the invisible boundary between here and there. 

These old borders are not beholden to equal measurements or straight lines, but to the landscape and the ways that people have moved across it. Seldom straight, they follow contours and stream meanders, skirt long-lost fields, turn back on themselves when the going gets tough. They leave patches of scrubby land that are too awkward to farm—patches where itinerant groups and the rural homeless would traditionally pitch camps, slipping over into the next parish if the constable came to uphold punitive vagrancy laws. The routes of these borders have been retained over centuries, seared into communal memory with seasonal rituals like the beating of the bounds, in which local people collectively walk the parish lines and thrash them with staffs. In a much less ceremonial way, we were beating the bounds too—Dad guiding me into his familiarity with the landscape and its history.

He would keep up a gleeful commentary as we went along. “Ridge-and-furrow,” he’d say, pointing to green undulations striping the hillside. “People pissed there,” he’d observe as we passed a patch of nettles on sheep-mown grass. “Ancient coppice,” he’d remark of spindly branches reaching out of the foliage. It was the marks people had left that he wanted to acknowledge—evidence of Medieval plough tracks, of dwellings long dismantled, of foresters needing hazel wands for fence hurdles, willow sticks for baskets. The ways the land had been used over centuries to support local industries, the quarrying and stonemasonry, hedging and saddle-making, brewing and smithing, alongside the farming. The way land use had changed, and not always for the better. The hawthorn hedges criss-crossing the landscape were evidence of the enclosure of common land; the stony lumps in grazing fields spoke of villages that had been emptied, sometimes through disease, sometimes through force. These were the fingerprints of people long gone, unremembered and unknowable. We couldn’t know them, even as we walked in their footsteps; we could still honour their passage.

The changes left ghost names behind, stories hidden in the gaps and mismatches. The valley under Edge Hill is known as the Vale of the Red Horse, named for a huge carving that was once cut into the clay of the hillside; the horse itself is long overgrown and lost. Every track and field had a name, and Dad pursued his hunger to find out about them, and to pass them on. Names that seemed to belong to a nursery rhyme land: Lesser Upper Ground, Further Close, Leatherlands where nothing much grows, the sweet-sounding Sugarswell—named not for confectionary, but the Old English word for robber. Names that changed just a fraction with each century: a Medieval landowner Aylrich once owned a hill, which became Awdridge Hill, became Archer’s Hill, became Orchard’s Hill. “Place names are like singing a song without knowing all the words,” Dad said, “you go by what you hear, and you make it fit.”

There’s no orchard on Orchard’s Hill; there’s not much woodland in this part of Warwickshire at all. Small bundles of trees grow in the awkward border patches, in disused quarries and gorse-speckled pasture, in landscaped plantations and as fox coverts. Oaks, limes, and sickly elms are positioned as ‘standards’ in the lines of hedge, dominated by fast-growing hawthorn. Quickthorn, it’s called—but not for its speed of growth. To quicken is to come to life, to give life, to return from the dead, and hawthorn is a quicken tree: its white blossom heralds summer. There’s quickthorn aplenty planted in the ryegrass field under Sun Rising, but in a way, all the trees there are quicken trees.

•••

Another year passes, and the family gathers by the field maple again—the special tree, the one for Dick. The day is sticky and overcast, but dry this time, with only the lightest breeze stirring the leaves and making the teasels sway. Bees are bobbing around both the maple and the crab apple, enveloping us in a steady hum; at our feet, the now four-year-old is singing Humpty Dumpty to herself: 

“Old chicken sauces and old chicken men

Couldn’t put Humpty together again.” 

My sister catches my eye and smiles. She points to the crab apple. It has overshot its plot, the further reaches of its boughs entangled with our maple’s growing branches. 

“Look at Gladys! She’s giving Dad a hug!”

The field maple is growing up. It stands proud where the trees meet the wildflower meadow; behind it, far beyond the boundary hedge, the ridge-and-furrowed hillside rises up to the scarp. As the tree gets bigger, its separateness from us becomes more pronounced. I think of walking with Dad, his face lighting up as he pointed out quirks of the landscape; I think of talking with Dad, relishing him, relishing him relishing me. “My pal,” he’d call me, pulling me into a side-long bear hug. “Chip off the old block.” I think of him striding ahead through the fields, drawing away from me, and my legs struggling against the clay to catch up with him. I think of all the times he retreated to his room and closed the door, all the hours and days and weeks we lost him to himself. He always came back—back to kick the clods off my boots, back into the world to be present with his loved ones again. At a certain point he couldn’t come back, but I’m still a chip off the old block, and my legs are strong enough to kick the clay off my own boots now.

We say goodbye to the field maple (“Bye, Dad!”) and goodbye to the crab apple (“Take care, Gladys!”), and on a whim we decide to take the longer route back to the carpark, beating the bounds of the burial ground. The four-year-old and I fall into step. She’s still singing Humpty Dumpty.

“It’s actually all the king’s horses and all the kings men,” I start to tell her, but she silences me with a withering upwards glance.

“It’s chickens,” she says firmly. “Humpty Dumpty is an egg.” She goes by what she hears, and she makes it fit.

•••

We never knew Gladys alive, but we know her crab apple tree well. She’s sturdy and short, thriving on her plot. We chat to her when we visit, just as we chat to Dad—playfully scolding her for the fruit she drops at his feet, admiring his height (so much taller than Dad was as a man). And undetected by us, the trees speak to each other. 

Scientists tell us that, deep in the earth, mycorrhizal fungi and root networks are transmitting nutrients, chemical signals, and even sounds to one another; above it, leaves are releasing cues and tip-offs in the form of scent compounds and gases. Ecologist Suzanne Simard has found that trees pass on information about their surroundings to the next generation; forester Peter Wohlleben tells us that trees are in constant communication with their own and other species, that they have personalities, that they are “even reluctant to abandon their dead”. Interconnected root systems can keep a felled tree stump alive for years. As we chatter away above ground, the trees’ utterances travel at a third of an inch per second. Their communication is not our communication, and their sense of time is not our time.

Dad lived for sixty-three years; field maples can live up to three hundred and fifty. Today, an elderly field maple will have had nearly a score of human generations pass it. It will have stood through regime-changes and rebellions, enclosures and expansions, beside the new seams of railway track and motorway cutting through the earth, under the white slip-streams of warplanes and commercial jets. The mark of each year’s weather, water conditions, sicknesses and injuries will have been imprinted in the ring added to its growing trunk. A tree has memory stored in its fibres.

A person is the centre of the world for the moment of their existence, and for very little more. We make our marks on each other and on our surroundings; these marks fade. Painful memories become less raw, new memories put down roots and interweave with old ones. We pick up what’s left, and we make it fit. A child who never knew her grandfather will remember a special tree. In another century, it’ll be just a tree—one among hundreds in a Warwickshire woodland, all secretly marking an invisible border between here and there.

•••

The four-year-old is now a five-year-old. She comes bounding home from school flushed with excitement about Rosalind Franklin, “who found out that people are made up of tiny bits of their parents, and their parents’ parents, and their parents’ parents’ parents!” She draws clumsy twisted ladders of polynucleotide chains next to a lady with a magnifying glass and (inexplicably) fairy wings, and dances her enthusiasm around the kitchen as her mother sticks the artwork on the fridge. 

“Rosalind Franklin is very, very clever. Can we go to her house and meet her?”

“Sorry, love,” my sister says. “I’m afraid she’s not around anymore.” 

“Oh. Like Dick.” The five-year-old is downcast for a moment, then brightens. “We should plant a special tree for her.”