Isabella Tree

You said that your rebelliousness was in part due to some anxieties that you'd felt about your adoption. Years later you did trace your birth mother, Geraldine, first via a letter, and then on the phone. I mean, that must have been such a big moment for both of you. How did it go?

It was really astonishing, and I remember feeling very guilty to begin with towards my parents. But when I told them that I was going to do this, my mother had obviously prepared herself for this, and she said the most wonderful thing. She said… Don't worry about meeting your mother, and I hope you love her. Um it doesn't mean you'll love us any the less. The human heart is the most amazing thing. It can just grow and grow and grow. It has infinite capacity. And that really was such a relief. It made me see it in a completely different way. And when I finally found Geraldine, I thought I would cry or something, but the relief was so enormous that I just laughed, and she laughed, and we laughed and laughed and talked for hours on the phone, and she wanted to know what I looked like, and said it's extraordinary if you had written this letter any later than you did, I would have been abroad. I said, Where are you going? and she said Papua New Guinea and I said, But that's where I'm going next week. So it was really astonishing. But I remember walking down the street literally I know what people mean when you walk on air. That's how it felt. It felt like some burden had been lifted. And from that moment on, that little rebelliousness, that little kind of grit that had been annoying away at me vanished, and I felt settled.

By the time you were ready to go to university, you already wanted to become a writer, but you chose to read classics rather than English as you'd originally intended to. Why was that?

It was really the advice of Iris Murdoch. She was a great friend of my uncle David Cecil who used to come to lunch every Sunday. And she was there one day and asked what I wanted to do in the future. And I said, you know, sort of rather shamefacedly in front of this wonderful novelist that I wanted to be a writer. And she said, well, what are you studying at university? And I said, well, English, of course. And she said, there's no, of course, about it. Don't study English. Any fool can read a book. You should be studying classics and then you'll really know how to use language. So that's what I did. And I still had this hankering to read English. But once I got to university and started reading the classics, I absolutely loved it. So she was right. She was absolutely right, yeah.

And that process began with a visit from an expert in managing oak trees, Ted Green. What did he tell you?

Oh, Ted's amazing. We brought him in to advise us on this big old oak tree. It's about five or six hundred years old. And he saw this wonderful specimen, and he said there's nothing wrong with it. It could go on for another three or four hundred years. But then he turned round and he looked at these lovely oaks in what had been the Repton Park around the house. that we had been merrily plowing right up to the trunks, and Ted says, you know, I can just tell when a friend of mine isn't looking well, and these friends of mine are not looking well. And we said, well, what was it? Was it the drought? Was it, you know, has it been storms? And he said, no, it's what you're doing to the soil underneath. It's the chopping up of the roots, it's the chemicals, and that's why they're looking like that. And suddenly we felt, my God, that this is down to us. These trees that we assumed would be there forever were dying and we were what was causing it. And that was the epiphany, I think, when we realised we've got to change our ways.