One of the difficulties my family faced when we moved from a geography with four seasons and loads of foliage to an almost desert is a lack of trees. The ones that exist are far from native and the placement is always forced rather than natural. Nothing grows by accident (that’s a gross oversimplification). At any rate, for years we’ve sort of ignored the trees that did exist as mocking tributes to our respective childhoods in a different climate. The cost of this, however, was that our son never really interacted with trees the way we did.
When I was a young boy we had a wonderful tree in our front yard. The trunk was almost non-existent and many branches shot out in all directions from a very low point (maybe six inches). This made the tree very easy to climb for me and my brothers (I don’t think my sister, who was two-ish when we moved, did much climbing on that tree). We had lots of great times climbing that tree and it taught us to climb bigger trees that were very close to our training-tree.
So, with a lot of joy, I decided to take our son to the nearest tree and place him on a branch. I went to great lengths to ensure that he wasn’t scared: long sleeves and pants to avoid scratching, a cooler day so he didn’t overheat, a steady breeze to provide interest in the leaves above. All of these precautions paid off because he sat happily, confidently, on the tree branch and smiled a very large smile as he said “tree” proudly. He’d always looked at the trees. We’d always pointed them out to him. We touched the bark and played with the leaves, but he’d never sat in a tree. That’s now been remedied.