My earliest tree memory is the Harshringar, which used to be my mother’s favourite; she had planted it. The flowers fall at night and in the morning, it is beautifully layered. We were in Lakhimpur Kheri, and that image of the flowers…even today when I see the Harshringar flowers, immediately I go back to that childhood period. I don’t remember anything else of that period except this one image, and of course, stealing biscuits from the pantry.

We were all born in the mountains, grew up in the mountains, the early period, the school. When we were in school in Nainital, I remember we weren’t always fully fed and I remember making sandwiches of the tender leaves of the Devdar, the God’s tree! We were in a boarding school, so, on the bread we’d put the leaves, you know, khatta–meetha. So, it was food. I mean, we innovated to turn it into food.

My mother had a farm in the terai, in the foothills of Nainital, and there was a banyan tree there. It must have had about ten aerial roots. It was like an entire house. No, it was bigger than a house. We had a jhoola on it. It was a big jhoola, square, like a khat. And I think one of my happiest moments were on that swing. Hours one could spend, just hours and hours and hours swinging on that tree.

Then of course, my more mature relationship is with the Neem, a very special tree for me. Both because it’s been so used, but also in 1984, when the Bhopal disaster happened, my thoughts were why is all this happening, this is all so unnecessary. And immediately, I took a branch of a Neem, and I am not an artist, you know, so I penciled the outline of every leaf, and printed posters titled, ‘No More Bhopals, Plant the Neem.’ And when eventually we could go, I think three days after the disaster, I took this poster and I took Neem saplings, saying we have to drive these pesticides out. It was one of the triggers to my shifting to organic farming. I just go around the country holding workshops…you don’t need pesticides, here’s the Neem. You know, the more you see the tree the more beautiful it grows. When everything is shriveled and tired, in the peak of summer, the leaves of the Neem come into full flower. So, in 1994, suddenly I find in a bio-technology journal an article titled, ‘World’s first bio-pesticide made from Neem.’ I said, my mother’s used Neem, my grandmother’s used Neem, we’ve had a ten-year campaign on Neem, what is going on? So, I started to track what this was all about. I thought it was a trade name, Margosan, they called it. Then I found they had a patent. I started to collect signatures around the country. Collected a hundred thousand signatures, and we challenged the patent. We fought that case for eleven years, along with two other women, because we had to fight it in Europe. It took the three of us eleven years but we got that patent struck down. It was a joint patent of the US Department of Agriculture, and this company called WR Grace, which incidentally had contaminated water outside Boston, and there’s a film based on that called A Civil Action.

Anyway, once I was carrying Neem saplings and this lovely Eastern UP coolie said to me at the station, ‘We really value the Neem at home, but in the city, it is not cared for.’ I said, ‘Well, I care for them.’ He didn’t want to charge me any money!

Then the Chipko Movement is a big part of my tree story. I was leaving for Canada to do my PhD in Physics. Before leaving, I went back to my favourite spots. To my horror, I found that the river wasn’t there, the stream wasn’t there, the forest had all been logged. I was broken inside. I was sitting at a dhaba in the hills, and people were chatting. I said, ‘Yeh to bahut badal gayaa. Do teen saal mein.’ And they said, ‘Haan par ab umeed hai.’ ‘Kyon?’ ‘Kyonki Chipko shuru ho gayaa hai.’ So, I immediately started to hunt, and every vacation, twice a year, even while doing my PhD I’d come back and volunteer for Chipko. I was there for a lot of padayatras, I gifted them the first camera, so that some pictures could be taken, and there would be some record. You know, our mother was highly educated but she chose to become a farmer at the end of her life. She used to write little books for us. Poetry. All her poetry was about trees. Basically, bringing the beauty and the utility of Indian trees into a child’s knowledge. And my father was a conservator of forests, right? So, they were trained to plant in straight lines. My mother was a free thinker. Suddenly, one Shisham tree started growing in our backyard in Dehradun. And my dad used to say, ‘Yeh, isko shade kardega, competition ho jaayega … isko kaatna chahiye.’ And my mother said, ‘Nature has designed it to be there, you are nobody to cut it.’ And today the Shisham is the best tree in our compound. She just resisted and wouldn’t listen to all the calculus that humans have imposed on trees. Trees can cooperate! And new research shows that you can starve one tree, but it will not starve because other trees will help it. So, there’s a whole web of life that these trees teach us about. So, my mama taught me all this. My father also taught us in a different way. He’d teach us things in the forest a lot. The forest was a classroom!

So, here we are going off to boarding school and one fine day our brother teaches us to rebel. You know, organizes us into a Union. Three of us– in a forest, a remote forest. Father is going off because a man-eater has been killing villagers and as a forest officer his duty is to protect the people, so he is getting ready to go when our brother says we are missing all the excitement and gets us all organized and we say, ‘All the other kids have all sorts of excitement and this hunt is the only thing we could go to and you are keeping us out of it,’ and my father eventually gave in to this blackmail, but had us put on a machan. Separate from where the bait was. And on our machan climbed all the junior officers, the rangers, the foresters and also there were three kids – the three of us – and I remember we were knitting on jhadoo sticks because it’s a long time you wait and wait and wait. And suddenly I am out of consciousness, because the branch on which the machan was put couldn’t hold this extra weight. My Dad heard the sound and intuitively he knew it was us. And just at that time he was aiming at the tigress. He left his gun. Ran past her. She didn’t attack him. And then my memory is that I’m on his back and the jeep was about five miles away and he’s carrying me because I had fractures … horrible memories of the fractures and the hospital, anesthesia … but a good lesson learnt – Don’t go beyond your little hole. My sister had a back injury which still troubles her and my brother had an ankle injury. But, still, we’ve been very fortunate. Mira, my sister, and I both feel life is so forgiving because we’ve received so much. And the trees also teach you that. They don’t say, ‘I won’t give you an apple till you pay me for it.’

Dr Vandana Shiva is a physicist, environmental activist, food sovereignty advocate, ecofeminist and author. She is the founder of the Navdanya Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (India). She received the Right Livelihood Award in 1993, also known as the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize.’