This experience gave me a new awareness of the trees that I passed as I went on my walks: they had wisdom that I could easily access by simply striking up a conversation and asking them a question. Yet it wasn’t until almost three years later — in January 2018, when I was on a Forest Bathing and Nature Therapy Meetup — that I deepened my connection with the trees even further. After a delightful afternoon of smelling, tasting, and engaging in completely new ways with the forest at Newlands Corner in Surrey, the group was guided to enter an ancient grove of yew trees. We were told to select one of the trees and then connect with it.

I instantly knew which one I needed to work with: it was a yew that had caught my eye off to the right-hand side of where we were standing in the grove. I walked straight to the yew, and I put my hands on its bark to make first contact. I then leaned in to hug the tree as I greeted it. I felt an instant connection to the yew, and he immediately began to speak to me.

The ancient yew acknowledged that he knew I was having trouble with the novel I had been working on at the time, my first work of fiction. It was slow moving, a struggle: I had always found writing nonfiction books to be easy, but fiction was a whole other story. I was learning a new skill, and it was very slow going and not at all fun. The yew suggested that I set aside the novel and instead, write a different book: a book of tree stories, in which I would  connect with trees in the same way that I was connecting with him, and they would share their stories with me.

“This is your work,” the yew said, “to share our wisdom.”

He made it clear to me that it was my job to help people connect to Nature, and to help rebuild the love and respect that humanity used to have for the Earth. He said that this was the way of the future; that this was one way to help the environment. It wasn’t enough to conserve water and other resources; humanity needed to rebuild its relationship with Nature. He said that this book would be a piece in the puzzle of what was necessary to help rekindle the deep and healthy relationship that humanity once had with Nature.

The yew acknowledged that I might need to “wrap it in a package” that would make the stories easier for people to digest: that perhaps the book would need to be marketed as fiction so that it could reach a wider audience. Many truths can be shared in fiction, and he suggested that perhaps the tree stories would be better received by readers if they thought they were made up. Or that maybe it would need to be marketed as a children’s book: he reminded me of the Madeleine L’Engle quote “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”

I took his advice and toyed around with the idea of writing this book as fiction: an eleven-year-old girl goes into the forest and gets one story from each of the Ogam trees. The Ogam — often spelled Ogham — is an early alphabet that has been identified as the earliest written record of the old Irish language. The original alphabet was comprised of twenty letters, with a further five added at a later date. Now, it is sometimes used by druids and other pagan groups as a form of divination, with each letter symbolizing a tree, which in turn represents a message. The twenty trees of the Ogam are birch, rowan, alder, willow, ash, hawthorn, oak, holly, hazel, apple, vine, ivy, reed, blackthorn, elder, silver fir, gorse, heather, poplar, and yew. My idea all sounded very neat and tidy, quite unlike how this book turned out.

In this initial plan, I would enter the woods myself, collecting the stories, and I would put it all together as if it were a novel. I suspected that the yew was right, and this might help the book to reach a wider audience: that of people who were open to the concept of tree-talk but in a magical, fictional setting. Not everyone will accept the idea of a person who talks to trees, and the yew had made it very clear to me that it was important for me to help them by bringing their stories to the widest possible audience of readers.

Yet presenting this as a work of fiction didn’t quite feel right. I detest lying, and I’m extremely uncomfortable with half-truths. After months of going back and forth and worrying about what to do, I decided to simply tell the truth: yes, I talk to trees. Yes, these are their stories. No, this is not a work of fiction.

I wasn’t fully comfortable with this decision, mostly because of my fears around what people would think of me. Throughout the year I found myself evading conversation around the topic of the book I was working on. I feared judgment, and only my closest friends knew the full truth of the contents of this book. Yet I knew that this was the right thing for me to do: I had to be honest about exactly where these stories had come from.

Because, let’s be honest: whether or not you believe that people can actually talk to trees — and hear their replies — there’s a lot more power to these messages if you know the truth of this book, which is that the stories were actually given to me by the trees. I didn’t make this stuff up. It isn’t a work of fiction. This is real. This is my truth, my experience, and I have chosen to share the unfiltered stories with you, just as they were given to me.

As I went on my weekly walks in Nature, various trees started to speak out to me: “I’m in your book,” some of them would inform me. If it was a cold or wet day, I would make a mental note to return and collect their story. Sometimes, if the weather was good, I would sit right down against the trunk of the tree and immediately connect with it to receive its tale. Several times throughout the year, it occurred to me that perhaps I should travel further from home to connect with some of the “superstar” trees in Britain: the most famous, ancient and gnarled trees that make their way into books and magazines. I thought of the Fortingall Yew, the Llangernyw Yew, and the Big Belly Oak of Savernake Forest. But that didn’t feel right: according to the Newlands Corner Yew, all trees have a story, and I had such an abundance of trees who were willing to share their wisdom with me that I decided to stick with the trees I knew. After all, I already had a relationship with them.

And this was a very important part of the journey of creating this book: building a relationship with the trees. While I’ve always loved trees for their beauty — as a child, I absolutely loved eating broccoli because I thought it looked like little green trees — I began to connect with them on a much deeper level, as individuals. I learned to think of them in the way I think of the different people in my life, and I started to feel like I knew them.

This wasn’t an easy process, though. Just because I was given a very clear topic for the book doesn’t mean that collecting the stories was a walk in the park (pun absolutely intended). Instead, it triggered all of my insecurities. Though I’ve been talking to trees since 2015, and I’ve been channeling spirit guides since the year before that, this book stretched me out of my comfort zone and forced me to grow both as a person and as a channel. Channeling is how I can best describe the method I used to collect these stories: it involves opening up a connection or line of communication, often to unseen or nonphysical beings such as spirit guides, angels, or ascended masters. You can channel your Higher Self, and you can also channel Nature spirits, such as the spirits of the trees who shared their stories in this book.

This book became a personal lesson in I am good enough, something that I’ve struggled with my entire life. It’s the theme that keeps coming up over and over when I do mindset work with myself to my clear fears, blocks, and limiting beliefs. I believe it’s one of the main topics that my soul chose to work on, develop, and clear in this lifetime. It’s one of the primary subjects in my personal school of life.

It didn’t help that the stories weren’t what I had expected: I thought I would receive a series of quaint and magical fairy tales, and what I actually got was very different…so much so that I worried that the stories might be a little too serious. I also struggled with the fear that my channeling skills weren’t good enough for me to receive the full tales, but rather only a superficial version of them…and that there was actually much more underneath the surface than I was able to tap into. The Newlands Corner Yew had given me a very serious task, and I wanted to do justice to the trees’ project. And to do so, I needed to believe that I was good enough to make it happen.