Kestane Park – Conk

Kestane Park — beautiful, overgrown, wild and desolate. A peaceful place for Elliott to hide from the world… until Conk, a dryad from The Murmur, bursts out of a chestnut husk and turns everything upside down.

The two boys discover they have more in common than either expected. Elliott has lost his mum.
Conk is desperate to save his Sister Tree. Elliott has pushed away the people trying to care for him.
Conk risks dishonour — and exile — from his own world.

Together, they unite in a quest to save Kestane Park from a bullying landowner and developers who threaten the parks future. But most dangerous of all is Conk’s own fate. He is wanted for breaking ancient laws forbidding dryads from crossing over from The Murmur — the powerful realm where the spirits of nature dwell.

Helped (and sometimes hindered) by friends from both worlds, Elliott and Conk learn that not even Father Time’s hourglass can change the course of nature… and sometimes, the hardest choices are the only ones we have.

This tree is the original ‘Last Tree Standing’, whose story inspired me to write Kestane Park – Conk. 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 Elliott 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 had 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 said, “and we named her, Last Tree Standing. We would join our arms around her in a hug to stop her from getting lonely.”