I grew up in England. I was born in Kent, a place of extreme natural beauty. In our garden we had a Cobnut tree. It’s not a very common tree, and some of my earliest memories are of these Cobnuts lying in our garden. My mother, when she moved into that house and had a baby boy, had this idea that I would grow up and climb that tree. It’s very much an idea of English boyhood that boys climb trees. Somehow, it’s very important that boys have this relationship with trees.

When I was five, we moved to Cambridge where we lived in a new house, a brand-new house where there was no vegetation at all. My parents planted this row of conifer trees in the back garden, and in the front garden they planted a Cherry tree which has now been cut down, but which, for much of my teens produced a whole carpet of pink blossoms in spring. Really beautiful.

The real tree memory of my Cambridge years was at school. My school was in this Victorian mansion which had been converted some years ago into the school, but which still had the old trees of the house, most of which were horse chestnut trees. We all spent the entire autumn playing ‘conkers’ with the horse chestnuts. Basically, there are these prickly green seed pods, which, when you crack them open, have shiny brown horse chestnuts, popularly called conkers, and boys skewer a hole through these conkers, put them on a string, and the game is that I hold up my conker, and you sort of try to smash it with your conker. If I hit your conker then I get another go, but if I miss, I hold up my conker and you have a go at mine. The biggest conker would be about the size of a ping-pong ball. So, basically, we spent the entire autumn foraging for conkers. You needed a certain kind of skill to hit the other conker, and everyone had that kind of skill, but what really made the difference in the game were the various kinds of exotic ways of preparing your conker to make it harder. A raw conker is a soft thing. It has a leathery shell but inside it’s mushy. So, what you could do was put it in a hot place and dry it out. There were lots of things we did to kind of make them as hard as possible. So, what people would do was walk around with their ‘two-er’ or their ‘three-er’ or ‘fifty-two-er’ depending on the conkers their conker had smashed!

Our school had a whole forest of these huge horse chestnut trees. In fact, across England now, the horse chestnut trees are sick with a fungus, and it makes me really sad because they were such a significant part of my childhood.

The other amazing tree in that school was one that the rich owner of the original house had imported, a Cedar of Lebanon. A huge cedar tree which a lot of nineteenth century aristocrats imported for their grounds because they are exotic and amazing and impressive. Then there was a Monkey-puzzle tree. These two very un-English trees were in the middle of the lawn and they were amazing. That whole period of my life was kind of around trees. I climbed a lot of trees!

The other thing is that in friends’ gardens…English trees have a lot of stuff on them, especially if the family has kids. They have swings hanging from them, they have tree houses, rope ladders and stuff like that. In English gardens, the tree is kind of like furniture.

Also, the names of trees are, I think, some of the most beautiful words in the English language _­­­– the willow, the poplar, the birch, the larch, the elm, I think they are all fantastic words, very evocative. Of course, many English writers have written about English trees because English pastoralism is so much a part of English culture. I think part of the thing is that trees live longer than human beings. You have a relationship with lots of living things that have shorter lives than you, like dogs and cats and things like that, but there’s something almost parental about trees: they were there before you, they outlast you, and they connect you to a longer timeframe. Often, when an oak tree is cut down in England, it’s like national news. If a medieval oak is cut down because it is sick there will be this news reflection on what this tree has seen ­­– it saw Elizabeth I, it saw the Magna Carta, that sort of thing. Often, they’ll take the cross-section of the tree and put it in the place where the tree had stood.

I’ve lived in a number of places, and I think that when you move, the trees of that new place are often one of the first things you connect to. I lived for a while in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France where the avenues are planted with majestic Plane trees. And Aix had a very harsh summer. It would be forty-two, forty-three degrees, so these plane trees shaded it. You look down these avenues and the cafes along the side of the road would be right under these trees, around their enormous trunks. The city felt like it was nestled around the trunks of these amazing Plane trees. I haven’t been back since I left, but, if I were to go, I’d go back and touch these trees.

In Delhi, the trees are amazing. My daughter was born in February, and I remember that when I drove her home from the hospital, from Greater Kailash, and came around the Ring Road, there were all these Semal trees just coming into bloom. The lighter-coloured ones seemed to come into bloom earlier. I remember this tiny baby in the back seat and all these trees blooming. Since then, the Semal tree has been the tree of our daughter.

Rana Dasgupta is a British novelist and essayist. His novels include Tokyo Cancelled and Solo, which won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize in 2009.  In 2014 he published Capital, a non-fiction account of the stupendous changes engulfing New Delhi as a result of globalization.  Capital won the Ryszard Kapuściński Award and the Prix Emile Guimet.