I want to be buried under my favourite tree – with my dog

Today I showered alfresco, naked and rooted in good ol’ English mud. Yesterday I gathered no food from the faint winter light that leaked from our dutiful star. Last week I stood silently and just listened.

A month ago I realised my sibling was sick, and last year a bit of one of my arms broke off.A decade back, I was a fraction smaller than I am now. Around a hundred years ago, I wrote music with the wind while Spitfires wrote scripts in the sky.



Two hundred years ago I was dwarfed by Eiffel’s distant birth. Three hundred years ago I glimpsed faint flickering of the first gas lights illuminating the dark. Four hundred years ago I germinated in the wake of the Great Plague.

What am I?I am a tree.OK well actually, I am Chris Packham. It’s true I am a body of carbon, like this favourite beech tree of mine.

But I’m not made of the same stuff. I might feel old but I’m not ancient. I might be grown up but I’m not magnificent.

I might be a part of nature but I’m not at one with it.But this totemic tree’s past shapes my present and determines the route of my squelchy tracks as I make a daily pilgrimage with my poodles to shelter under its gargantuan body. Under it I feel better and comforted by my nothingness.

The sublime power of nature is impossible to imitate. I love and embrace the knowledge of that; that I am a mite for a minute in its shade.The ways in which I strive daily are an attempt to nudge the future to be better than it could be.

But next to this organism I am necessarily humbled and inconsequential. I embrace this truth – for me it’s an essential part of being connected to nature.I’m about to get my second set of hearing aids, I need lens surgery (again) and I have an achy back.

I know I am aging when I complain, I can’t see without those wretched glasses and am constantly nagged by my partner to “just do some pilates”. But I also know that one day there’ll be no new leaves for me to turn or time to shout above the noise. The one thin line of light which is my life, separating my former nothingness from my future nothingness, will just go out.

Goodnight, goodbye, farewell.When that happens, I want my ashes to be mixed with those of my late poodles and sown around that beech which has emotionally anchored me for decades.I know I’m not alone in having a strong bond with trees.

The indigenous Orang Rimba of Sumatra, who I’ve been privileged to meet, are assigned two protective trees at birth. Firstly a tenggeris, a tall evergreen, the bark of which is rubbed onto the crown of a newborn to give it strength. Then a sentubung, a small perrenial white flowered shrub, which is where their placenta is buried.

The tree’s human guards it for life and anyone found harming it will be at the mercy of strict punishment. In effect this sacred tree becomes the child’s sibling accompanying it through life. That’s my sort of religion and it’s why I came to dedicate my latest children’s book to that mighty beech.

Hopefully by the time I’m united with my beech as carbon, it will still be leafing strong. These trees don’t like it wet – they are European in origin, so in the UK they’re at the upper range of their comfort zone. As we know that zone is becoming less and less comfortable due to climate breakdown and its associated extreme weather events.

Back in my garden I work to repay the loan from nature of still being alive. I plant saplings because I’ve always been more attracted to a hopeful future than fearful of a damaged past. It makes me less risk-averse.

Indeed, generally, I’m not minded to think inside a box because no box exists. This outlook has its hazards, such as the “trollidiots” who attack me online. Who cares? Not me!#color-context-related-article-3117269 {--inews-color-primary: #3759B7;--inews-color-secondary: #EFF2FA;--inews-color-tertiary: #3759B7;} Read Next square KIRI PRITCHARD-MCLEAN I'm a vegan farmer - and it's as tricky as it soundsRead MoreWhen I stretch my imagination to 2525, I have to try hard to be optimistic enough to square the circle of life, and see those saplings standing there; all grown up, their buds emerging to get on with decarbonising the planet.

Beyond the confines of my garden I imagine a future where nature has reclaimed its rights in a less human dominated world – so that there is vastly more green than grey coloured Earth. With this in mind I smile with every shove of the spade, and with every handful of mud and cherished (vegan) hot chocolate break.if(window.

adverts) { window.adverts.addToArray({"pos": "inread-hb-ros-inews"}); }I may not believe in Christmas anymore but I still need to believe in miracles.

I need to believe that, against mounting evidence to the contrary, my generation can implement more environmental solutions than they have caused problems. So I’ll dig on until I am no more than fertiliser for my best friend, the giant beech in the woods. Until me and the poodles will become its leaves – how lovely that will be.

This week I have been...

Visiting...

the Hayward, my favourite gallery, which is on the South Bank of the Thames. It is constructed in brutalist style and hosts bold exhibitions. Linder’s Danger Came Smiling and Mickalene Thomas’s All About Love shows, on at the moment, are no exception.

Linder’s harsh razor cut’n’paste montages critically examine our seismically changed attitudes to materialism, fashion and gender stereotypes. Thomas’s work is sumptuous; a glittering boudoir of ravishing collages. It’s glamour in deep rich colours – with a nod to Manet’s portraits.

It’s perfumed with questions about black femininity and power, all framed in the complexion of 1970’s “blaxploitation” movies. I only had an hour and half so I’ll be going back – second visits to exhibitions are always more rewarding.Reading.

.. Mainly New Scientist and Viz.

Poles apart, very different pleasures. New Scientist ought to be mandatory reading for a lot of the country. It’s absolutely brilliant on climate and it tells, almost dispassionately, the terrifying truth.

The truth is that we all need to make proper informed decisions about how we shape our futures. The next time I pass Keir Starmer or Rachel Reeves in Westminster I should stuff a copy in their pocket. And it always delivers a totally amazing nugget of new science which re-affirms my faith in the beauty of the human mind.

Meanwhile, the joy of Viz is the ingenious wit of the human mind. It involves lines such as: “I wonder if Rod Hull ever used Emu to take hot stuff out of the oven” – a reference to the comedian who rarely appeared without his hand puppet Emu.Listening.

.. I’m on and off the podcast The Rest is History – like it’s a radio station that every now and again slips in a U2 track.

I love it, but then a glib comment sends me into a rage and I defect to History Extra. At the moment I’m back on – it’s the Roman historian Suetonius’s biographies of the infamous Roman emperors, spiced up by Dom and Tom (Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland), so it’s sordid, sick and strangely compelling. These were very powerful, very bad men, doing very bad things.

.. Now where’s the contemporary parallel for that I wonder?Little Experts: Superhero Plants by Chris Packham, illustrated by Jake Williams, is available now (Red Shed, Hardback, £9.

99).