I’m starting here, well almost. I started yesterday, with a sycamore tree. I like sycamore trees, although as a gardener I sometimes found them over-productive of offspring. A relatively young tree would shed multitudes of seed, most of which germinated, producing mini forests of seedlings, which if not culled at birth sent roots diving down into the earth to latch onto fixed things underground and powerfully resist removal.

But this little story is not about them as weeds, or about them as great trees, which they sometimes become. It is about two or three young ones I saw yesterday, on the edge of a pub garden somewhere in the Berkshire countryside.

I’m writing this part from memory. Later I will go out and find a Sussex tree and write and look at the same time. Yesterday I noticed how beautiful the trees were. It is not a good time of year for trees, visually. The leaves are becoming ragged, and are not yet colouring before the autumn release. They are often brown at the edges, and affected by all sorts of diseases and insect damage and deformity. In the case of sycamores the leaves have many black patches that are the fruiting bodies of tar spot fungus.

What I remember is beauty. Louise had taken me to an old country pub, and we sat side by side and drank local cider. The trees were just outside the boundary of the garden, young adult trees, past the weed stage, but not yet great matriarchs. The trees were beautiful. It was an ordinary beauty, no less rare for its ordinariness. Beauty is, I suppose, always there, and what was different yesterday was that I could see it. And once seen, it lodged itself in me, and I snuggled a little closer to Louise and said ‘Those trees are beautiful.’

So! I went out with the dogs this morning to look for a sycamore tree for live coverage. It’s dogs plural because Little, from a few doors down, is staying. Off we go, destination the Trundle car park, where there are lots of trees. I will transcribe what I wrote in my notebook. I was not able to replicate yesterday, but maybe that is obvious. Anyway, here it is:

‘It’s funny. It’s like taking a photograph. Getting the right angle, the right composition; getting the light right. I’m near the Trundle, above Chichester, where I live. I’m on the edge of the woodland that climbs the hill from West Dean. I’ve found a sycamore tree. Two rooks move high and fast across the sky. I feel a bit like David Attenborough with his gorillas.

The tree I’ve chosen is a bit bigger than the ones yesterday, starting to spread and reach, starting to express itself. In the middle I can see through the foliage to multi-stems mottled with lighter patches of lichen, and the main trunk, almost invisible with a covering of ivy.

The leaves hang in bunches with long yellow leaf stalks quite visible, and sometimes coloured with a light reddish hue, almost pink, but not quite. The leaves are ragged, and they are not such a dark green as the ones yesterday, with less tar spots. The leaves turn here and there to show their paler underside.

I can’t quite grasp what I saw yesterday, and then the sun comes out and there’s a glimmer of it.

But how do I express beauty?

I think it is the feeling I have for the person sitting next to me and when I look across the garden and say ‘Those trees are beautiful’ I am actually saying something else entirely.’

It’s obvious really. A sycamore tree seen in the company of Louise is more beautiful than a sycamore tree posing for a writer on a hillside!