For novelist Jessie Cole, childhood memories are rooted in her parents’ tree-topped property.

When home is in the middle of a forest planted by your parents, ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ have a symbiotic relationship, writes the author.

I’ve lived in the same house almost all my life. My parents bought these acres of abandoned cow paddocks in northern NSW around the time they had me, nearly 40 years ago. They began planting before the house went up,andthetreesandIgrewtogether.Seedlingstosaplings and onwards towards the sky. They tower above me now, magnificent giants, in the forest I call home. When old friends of my parents visit they marvel at the size and scale of the garden, saying, ‘Oh, I remember when this tree here was only so high,’ holding out a hand at about hip height.

I try to see the place through their eyes, the way it used to be, but even though I’ve been here all along, I can recall no image of the garden in the past. Staying in the one place, my memories have been overlaid, one on top of the other, as though every new day has imprinted itsshapeonmeandIcannolongerseewhatisunderneath. Instead, I remember the textures of the past. The feel of the bricks beneath my feet, the clacking sound of my rollerskates, the smell of the rain in summer, the soft swish of my mother’s skirts as she walked by.

The forest itself is thick, the house submerged in a sea of green. It’s not ornamental, like most gardens, but vigorous and self-maintaining. It seems to have its own microclimate. Birdsong is various and ever-present. Staghorns and elkhorns and mosses and lichen grow on the tree trunks, the bright flowering bromeliads endlessly reproduce. There are snakes and frogs and tiny colonies of microbats. It is staggering to consider that our forest is only 40 years old; it feels timeless, eternal.

I know my parents had a vision when they created it, but I don’t think they could have imagined just how big or beautiful or self-sufficient each tree they lovingly patted soil around could grow. Planting trees is a commitment to a far-off future. There is something deeply hopeful about it. When I was a kid, growing in this growing forest, the future seemed endlessly bright. Everything was wildly fertile, all around me teeming with life.

When I was 12, my teenage sister died suddenly. The hows and whys are best reserved for another time, another telling. My parents were beyond bereft. This forest paradise they had created from scratch could not hold their sorrow. My father erected a giant log in the garden in memory of her. He had planned to carve her name into it like a tombstone but, overcome by grief, never did. It remained, lonely and unexplained, in this wild sea of green.

It’s been 27 years since my sister’s death, but the log still stands. Once a rich woody brown, it is now shrunken and grey. Furrows run down it in vertical lines; the rain has made its mark. It looks, quite simply, like a dead tree, where once it had all the majesty of a monument. Walking past, I stand and stare at it a while, remembering, for once, how the forest used to be. When my father first erected the log, it was large and imposing, but now the

Staying in the one place, my memories have been overlaid, as though every new day has imprinted its shape on me.

trees have grown around it, dwarfing it in size. I think about my sister, her life cut so short. She stopped being while everything else lived on. When my father thought to memorialise her in this grand half-finished gesture, he couldn’t possibly know how apt a symbol it would one day become. I touch my fingers to the dry bark. My sister’s log. The dead still here among the living.

People often proclaim that what’s needed in times of trouble is a fresh start, and I can see the allure. The temptation to begin again, to wipe the slate clean. To move forward as though the past never happened, to have it vanish behind us, to be unencumbered by its weight. But sometimes you have to stick around to see things come to fruition. Some trees live hundreds of years. The magnitude of those lifespans are hard for the human mind to comprehend. How can we know, when we plant the seed, just how extraordinary a tree might become?

My home in the forest contains so many overlaid memories it’s difficult to experience them with any clarity. The hope and the loss and the joy and the sorrow, like seams of soil, building and building. There is a density to it, this layering of memory, a richness. I look out my windows at the gentle sway of the forest leaves, the trees so solid, so enduring. I was planted here, I think. What will I become?