With 5 days left to go on the 365 day nature play challenge we seek out the oldest, biggest tree we can find in the local parks and work out how to play with it.
5 – Getting to know a special tree
Saturday 27 December. Sunny. 5°C
The 365 day nature play challenge is almost over and I’m determined to get this challenge in first. We’ve done a lot with and around trees but I don’t feel we’ve spent any time actually looking and examining them properly. Middle of the winter may not be the easiest time. The leaves are off and they’re harder to identify but that’s not going to stop me.
After keeping an eye out for a while I’ve found a really brilliant one. It’s in a park we go to occasionally and we run past it a lot without looking at it. One morning I’m struck by the sheer size of the trunk. It’s huge. Easily the biggest I’ve seen locally. It’s not the best climbing tree but you can sit in it a bit. The trunk is full of little hidey holes and dark cobwebby areas and, on one side, you can stand in the trunk and pretend you’re part of the tree. Basically, it’s wonderful.
First off I challenge B to find it. This does need a bit of guidance. There are a lot of big trees in the park. I tell her she’s looking for the one with the biggest trunk and point her in the general direction. She runs on and examines it before I get there. It’s meeting with her approval I can tell. She’s trying to see the top. When I arrive she shrugs.
B: ‘It’s nice. Can we go now?”
L: “NO! We’ve got loads of stuff to do. Look, I brought gemstones.”
Gemstones always work. We each take two and hide them in the trunk and have to find each others. B does a good job of getting behind the cobwebs and burying them in the dips. I go for wedging them into the bark.
We have a go at sitting in the seat (it’s a bit narrow) and hang off it’s branches. When you put your ear to it the wind whistles almost through it and makes a strange noise. We work out which is the best bit to hug.
As we’re looking for the gemstones, to B’s amusement a nut falls from the tree and misses my head by inches. She says it’s telling me off. It’s a very cool nut. A bit belatedly we look up and properly clock that it’s an evergreen. I wonder if it’s a yew. I’m a bit fascinated by yew trees but a bit of research later says it’s a cypress. It has the coolest nuts ever. They look like an old fashioned stitched football. We nab the one that just missed me and take it home.
It’s not the longest challenge we’ve done but it was possibly my favourite, and I think quite high up B’s list too. We’re going to do this one again. I want to see how many different kinds of trees we can find and what other ways we can find to play in them. And it’s good to know it doesn’t have to be a summer activity.
