Trish Nicholson's Blog

    We left the herons building their nest and trying it out for size. (If you missed Part 1 it is here.) When a gang of noisy magpies charged around the tree-house pine and the neighbouring casuarina tree, squabbling

The post Love in the Tree House: Part 2 first appeared on Trish Nicholsons Words in the Treehouse.

  As the old song says: “Love is a many splendored thing … nature’s way of giving a reason to be living,” and we teasingly call courting couples ‘love birds’. But do birds experience love? It’s a moot point. Birds

The post Love in the Tree House first appeared on Trish Nicholsons Words in the Treehouse.

For one person to hand plant five acres of hillside with native trees takes years. And the trees may take decades to reach maturity. But the creation of a forest community extending above and below ground is Nature’s work of

The post Time in The Five Acre Forest first appeared on Trish Nicholsons Words in the Treehouse.

A forest is never complete; nothing in nature is ever truly finished. All living things exist in a state of transition, of becoming and, therefore, of perpetual uncertainty and change – and not only sentient beings but the land as

The post Beneath the Five Acre Forest first appeared on Trish Nicholsons Words in the Treehouse.

The five acre forest now clothes an ancient migrated dune; it is all sand and therefore dry land. After twenty years of clearing and planting, topsoil is beginning to form where tree debris has been left to rot and return

The post The Round Garden in the Five Acre Forest first appeared on Trish Nicholsons Words in the Treehouse.

    Spring releases a fresh sense of urgency in the forest. Here in New Zealand, spring begins on the first day of September. I listen for the harbinger of the season, pipiwharauroa, the shining cuckoo, whose long soprano aria,

The post Spring in the Five Acre Forest first appeared on Trish Nicholsons Words in the Treehouse.

The emotional aspects of conservation create deep bonds with the land

The post Forests: Courting, or Wilding? first appeared on Trish Nicholsons Words in the Treehouse.

  My view on a bright sunny day – clouds paddling in the lake, trees preening along the water’s edge – and it is what I saw from the top of an eroded, weed-infested hill in New Zealand’s far north

The post Seeds of the Five Acre Forest first appeared on Trish Nicholsons Words in the Treehouse.

Clouds: art in the sky Whether we see the sky as a lid shutting us in; a window into infinity; or a perpetual art gallery enticing our imaginations, depends partly on our mood. It also depends on how much sky

  The power of Scheherazade’s storytelling saves her life. The characters, too, often gain redemption through telling their stories. Even Schahriar, the sultan who holds Scheherazade’s life in the balance each day, is freed from his self-defeating obsession against women