July 14 2025
Dear All,
July 14 is, of course, the day that the Bastille was stormed in France in 1789. There were not many left to liberate in the Bastille that day, but many of them had grown old in jail and must have emerged perplexed by the new order. Liberty, equality, fraternity – it was all a far cry from the old regime. Dare we hope that a similar act of courage and decisiveness could take place in our time, setting prisoners free?
Lately, I have become obsessed with trees. At a time of stress in the world and unusual heat, they cool us down, offer us a long-term vision. It takes time, for a tree to grow and become mature; they will not be hurried. As a young person, I climbed them, made tree-houses in them and hid from adults in their leafy branches. Trees were ships at sea, castles, hide-outs, look-outs, refuges from the world. They had personalities and qualities, and as I spent hours in them, I got to know them well – the sycamore, the copper beech, the vast cedar, the rhododendron, they were my familiar haunts.
My tree-climbing days are long gone, but trees figure in life now in a different way – they are our heritage as surely as books and writing, our connection with the past and our ability to survive in the future. In the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, I went sit once again with my spine pressed against the vast solidity of the cedar that Jussieu planted in the mid-18th century. In Oxford, where I am at present, I walk early in the University Parks from tree to tree, grateful to the long-dead people who planted them, enjoying their gift of deep shade in a blazing hot summer. In Key West, where we need deep shade more than ever, ancient mahoganies are felled because they are ‘unsafe’, I mourn for them and feel the extra heat of the sun generated by their absence.
There is a contest being run here at present in the UK by the Wildlife Society, to find Britain’s most venerable tree. Judi Dench has pointed out that some trees existed before Shakespeare wrote. There is the cedar that the Beatles sat in, and the vast oak at Sissinghurst that figures in Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando. Trees matter – they always have – but now, in these times of climate crisis, they save our day, shelter and protect, make our public places livable. We need them as never before.
As a child, I loved not only trees, but stationery cupboards. At our small school in the 1950’s, the stationery cupboard was in a room called the Green Room, which you entered from behind the blackboard. Here was a treasure trove, a stack of pristine untouched exercise books, and the sight and smell of them gave me untold excitement. To be allowed to take a new book and open it, to write my name on the page, was a particular, almost erotic pleasure. I still feel much the same way about clean paper – and knowing that it comes from trees, am grateful in retrospect, for them giving up their material essence, that we may write books that people can hold in their hands.
The connection between trees and writing is of course, our material, paper. We writers know that we use trees; but we can, happily, recycle paper and re-use it. I’m glad that my contract with a new editor, Jaynie Royal at Regal House Press, includes a clause on the press’s consciousness about the use of paper, and climate change in general. And that leads me – I got here by a roundabout route – to announcing that my new novel Indigo Sky At Noon, has just now found a home with this very forward-looking and innovative small publishing house in North Carolina.
Go well, stay cool,
Affectionately, Ros