The moment that shaped my relationship with nature wasn’t a hike or a camping trip. It was a tree in our back garden.
An 80 ft sequoia to be exact, a giant that lorded over our suburban Shropshire home in a setting it was frankly far too magnificent for. Even as a six-year-old, blissfully unaware of appropriate expletives, I remember looking up and thinking: that thing is enormous.
The trunk must’ve been 3 or 4 meters across, wrapped in a thick, spongy bark that acted as an organic crash mat for when my brothers rope-swung each other into it with the wild abandon of young stuntmen who’d never heard of A&E. About six metres up, a huge limb jutted out at a perfect right angle before turning sharply skyward, like the tree had grown a custom climbing frame just for us. My dad said it would’ve made a perfect gibbet, a comforting thought for a child.
It dominated the garden: branches fanning out over summer BBQs, pine cones doubling as hand-grenades, fallen sticks becoming swords, climbing ropes turning the whole thing into our own personal training camp. At one point, Dad even rigged up a zip line using an upturned bicycle wheel and some handlebars, because this was the ‘90s and risk assessments hadn’t been invented yet.
I loved that tree. It wasn’t just in our childhood, it shaped it. It was ours.
That obsession didn’t fade with adulthood. I now appreciate trees more than is comfortable for my wife, who has learned to quietly tolerate me pulling the car over mid-journey because “did you SEE that beauty?” I no longer just admire trees; I greet them. I touch them (appropriately). I sleep among them in my hammock. I uprooted my entire life from Australia to the Forest of Dean last year so we could live amongst them.
In 2020 I kicked off a project that planted 8,000 native trees in Australia, bought a hectare of the Daintree Rainforest to protect some more, and once even ran a performance review halfway up a giant fig tree with a very concerned employee clinging on beside me. This summer we had to reluctantly take down a regal looking Goat Willow in our driveway, a genuinely traumatic experience, though marginally less traumatic than the alternative (a passing pedestrian flattened into a human crêpe).
As I’ve crept further toward middle age my appreciation for trees has intensified further. Just walking beneath them does something profound to my nervous system that I can’t fully explain. The ponds near our house are towered over by enormous Douglas firs, another wonderfully out-of-place North American immigrant in the British countryside. Catch me on a bright spring morning walking past those giants and I’ll probably avoid eye contact so you don’t see the tears. Being among magnificent trees these days feels borderline spiritual.
Since having kids that love has only accelerated, because like most kids, mine will climb anything vaguely vertical and wooden.
The trick is working out how to get up there…
How to Make a Rope Ladder
Inspired by the Lost Boys in Hook, we decided to take tree climbing to the next level and build a rope ladder. After some YouTubing and a round of product testing in the local woods this week, I can confirm we are now cooking on gas!
Here’s the field-tested version.
Gear you’ll need
Sticks for rungs
Saw
Rope
Carabiner
1) Pick your wood
You’ll need a handful of hardwood posts or strong branches. We’d recently cut down a few rogue limbs in the garden, so I sawed eight 12–15 inch rungs from the sturdiest one. Test each one with your weight and if it snaps, good news: you just dodged a hospital visit.
2) Pick your rope
Use a 12mm rope that can handle weather and weight. We used this hemp rope that worked perfectly. Ignore the frayed, suspicious-smelling ball of “rope” in the shed.
3) Attach the carabiner
Find the rope’s halfway point and knot it firmly to your carabiner. Clip it to something solid while you work as it makes the next step much easier. I used the front door lock in the hallway because it was bloody baltic outside.
4) Assemble the rungs
This is the fun bit: the knots. Use a constrictor hitch on each side of every rung. It’s simpler than it sounds. See photos below (you’ll do it the opposite way on the left side of the rungs). They’ll cinch themselves even tighter once the ladder is in use. Keep adding rungs until you’ve hit the height you want.
5) Find the right branch
We packed the ladder into a backpack and went hunting through the local woods for the perfect oak. You can either throw a separate rope over a solid branch and clip your carabiner to that, or loop the carabiner straight around the branch and clip it back onto the ladder rope. Either works.
A few quick lessons from our trial-and-error:
Hanging the ladder straight from an exposed branch makes it swing like a medieval torture device.
If the top branch is too thick, getting up onto it from the ladder can be awkward.
Running the ladder close to the main trunk solved both issues.
Tree selection is everything. Take a moment to visualise how it’ll work: where you’ll stand, where you’ll step, where you’ll bail if necessary.
A note on safety (and ambition) - Tree climbing is obviously risky, so dial back the excitement a smidge and match the ambition of your child. As tempting as it is to go big, start lower. Kids love it regardless.