Kestane Park

Kestane Park, beautiful, overgrown, wild and desolate. A peaceful place for Lucas to hang out, until Kes, a dryad from The Murmur, bursts out of a Chestnut Husk. The two boys find they have a lot in common. Lucas has lost his mum. Kes wants to save his Mother Tree. Lucas has alienated himself from the people caring for him. Kes risks dis-honour and alienation from his world. The boys unite in a quest to save Kestane Park from a bullying, greedy landowner, and unscrupulous land developers. But most dangerous of all, trackers hunt Kes. ‘WANTED’ for breaking ancient laws which forbid his crossing over from ‘The Murmur’, a powerful place where the spirits of nature dwell. Helped and sometimes hindered by friends from both worlds, the boys learn that not even Father Time’s hourglass can change the course of nature; and sometimes difficult choices are all there are.

This tree is the original ‘Last Tree Standing’, whose story inspired me to write Leštane Park. This surviving Horse Chestnut Tree, chopped and trimmed over the years, is not as tall as I remember, but then I have grown a few inches since I was a child.

Excerpt from ‘Last Tree Standing.’
He rushed forward, mum and home always inside his head, always the lumpy jabs in his throat. Their home had stood on a wide tarmac pavement; the same house mum had grown up in. She told Lucas that when she was a girl there had been no tarmac, “only lovely paving slabs I could play hopscotch on with my friends”. Between the pavements and the road there had been broad grassy verges, sprung with an avenue of horse chestnut trees. These trees, huge and old, made sure children playing only had “fresh clean air to breathe”. In early autumn, they offered an abundance of conkers for their games. One-day, Mum and her friends watched in horror as council workers pulled their lovely paving slabs up. Over the following weeks, the grassy verges and trees also disappeared. “They left only one tree on the corner to live.” Mum and her friends named it, “Last Tree Standing. We would join our arms around it in a hug to stop it from getting lonely.”