I visited a tree which I knew like a friend ...

Last week, entirely by accident, I found myself standing beneath a tree which I knew so well but had only ever seen through photos.

A photograph of this 1,000-year-old Yew Tree was sent to me by my editor at Big Picture Press early on in developing 'What Do You See When You Look at a Tree?'. I'd already been deeply researching trees, but this tree, in particular, took my breath away. I became obsessed with knowing as much about this tree as possible. I Googled, looked at photographs, watched YouTube Videos, and read articles on tree blogs about this magnificent ancient tree.

'What Do You See When You Look at a Tree?' was written and illustrated during the pandemic, meaning I couldn't physically go and sit under its canopy or rub its bark with my palms. Besides, it was almost eight hours away; the tree was in Scotland, and I was in Devon. As lockdowns lifted, I visited Wistman's Wood, an ancient woodland on Dartmoor, and the green glow, almost luminescent, created as the sun broke through the branches, felt the same in the photographs I'd seen from the Yew Tree.

Through a mishmash of references from multiple sites, and photographs of my local ancient forest, I captured part of the tree's magic at the beginning of the book, "just like the trees long before."

And then something unexpected and amazing happened. Last week, whilst visiting Edinburgh, my friend Maddie said she'd like to take me to see a very special tree. We arrived and ducked under the canopy, emerging inside the tree, but not just any tree, THE tree, the tree from the photographs I'd been looking at all those months ago, the tree I'd longed to sit under and had thought about all this time.

I didn't expect how emotional it would make me feel. A living piece of history growing out of the ground, almost electric to touch.

I had dreamed of visiting this tree, sitting under its arms and soaking in its magic. I'd imagined drawing its long, lolloping branches, which felt like they melted into the ground, and now I was here, sketching happily away, listening to birds and tree creak overhead.

There are things I hadn't noticed before. From the photographs, it looked like the tree stood within a forest, with smaller trees surrounding it, but Maddie pointed out that these are the same tree; it's all the same tree, growing and regrowing over and over again; it surrounded itself in a circle of beautiful young Yew Trees, a family.

A few hours later, we were on our way back into Edinburgh, a sketchbook of drawings which would never capture the real brilliance of this tree. Back at Maddie's house, with a cup of tea, we compared the tree we'd just seen to the one in What Do You See, which in hindsight doesn't really feel like the tree, but will always be that tree for me.