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In the monochrome majesty of the forest, where almost everything is green or underpins green, like the grey of the spruces’ bark, the birches with their white trunks stand out, and it is easy to imagine that they belong to a finer species, a sort of sylvan aristocracy, erect and stylish, beautiful and highly strung. But beauty and genealogy are both human notions and have little of essence to say about either animals or trees, so when we think of the spruce as sombre and brooding, the pine tree as proud and freedom-loving, the aspen as anxious, the oak as majestic and the birch as sensitive and perhaps in its nature more like a horse than a tree, we are transforming them into ourselves, we are transplanting our inner selves into the exterior world. But even knowing that this is so, that everything which grows in the forest is indifferent to us and our notions about it, including Darwin's theory of evolution and Linnaean taxonomy, the sight of a forest floor covered with wood anemones, for example, always wakens a thought in me that wood anemones are not merely beautiful but good, while the sight of a birch, like the one that grows in the garden here, right next to where I park the car, is for me always associated with fragility. This is of course precisely because the birch stands out among other trees, and because in the world of humans I have come to expect that those who stand out are also fragile. When I was growing up, I knew exactly where all the birches were, they seemed to define the places they grew in, as did the bus stop, the bridge buttress, the outcrop of rock, the marsh and the pond, each in their own way. I was familiar with the different appearances of birches, how in winter they lost their volume entirely, like dogs or cats with shaggy fur who seem to shrink when they get wet; how their thin twigs were covered with pale green buds in spring, which no matter how old the trees were – and some of them must have been my grandparents’ age – made them look young and bashful; how their small sequin-shaped leaves hung in dense garlands in summer, so that their foliage resembled gowns; and how in the early-autumn storms they could look like ships with sails stretched taut by the wind, or swans beating their wings as they rose from the water. Birches were one of the few trees we didn't climb, the bark was slippery and difficult to get a grip on with one's shoe soles, and the trunk usually didn't divide into larger branches until some way up. Yet birches were not for the eyes alone – every spring we sought them out, selected one and cut off a branch, inserted the stub into a bottle, tied the bottle fast and let it hang there until the next day, when it would be full of a clear green liquid which we then drank, it was as sweet as fruit squash. I don't know where that knowledge had come from, but everyone had it, this was in the 1970s, so people still picked berries, not just for the sake of the outing but to supplement the household budget – they went fishing for the same reason – and children's lives were interwoven with this manual world, we made flutes of the bark of willow branches and the stems of dandelions, bows and arrows from young broadleaf trees, we drank birch sap and built huts from spruce twigs, but we also sat in our rooms listening to Status Quo, Mud, Slade and Gary Glitter. The unfathomable age of tree species wasn't something we related to, but then nor did we relate to the unfathomable age of our own species; for us everything was here and now, everything was contemporary, the birch, the car, the classroom, the forest grove, the blueberry bush, the music, the fish, the boat. And in a certain sense we were right, for with the exception of the mountains and the sea, almost nothing of all that surrounded us lasted longer than a human lifespan, including the birches, which in rare instances can grow to be three hundred years old but which usually live for about a hundred. But while the music we listened to changed from English glam to English punk and post-punk, and the clothes we wore went from the bell-bottoms and knitted sweaters of the 1970s to the black coats and Doc Martens of the 1980s, and we moved away while the children who came after us were no longer drawn to the forest, the birches stood as they had always stood, in poses first struck millions of years ago, in the Cretaceous, when the white and black trunks and tender green leaves of birches began to appear in the forests and their characteristic movements in the wind were for the first time performed on the world stage.