I’m hoping you can help me find a book that I’ve been trying to remember for years.
I can’t remember the name at all, but it’s a fiction book in which children still have a natural ability to speak to trees, but adults have all forgotten how to (around puberty) by losing their belief in childish things. There are rowan trees, elder trees, ash trees and many others but they are the main trees I recall being part of the story.
I’m an eighties kid but it could be an older publication, I used the public library a lot and had a teacher who lent me her favourite childhood books too.
I think the cover had a colour pencil style drawing on it, mostly green in colour, but this is hazy so could be mixing up a memory.
I also can’t remember the children’s names or the story arc so I realise it a long shot!
Possibly the Green Sky Trilogy by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. First book is Below the Root: Born in a future world, on a planet covered by enormous trees, Raamo begins to learn the hidden truths that underlie his beautiful but secretive civilization.
http://www.zksnyder.com/belowroot.html
Maybe “So You Want To Be A Wizard”. There is a girl who finds a book in a library and it lets her speak to trees and when she talks to the tree in her back yard she tells him she remembers him talking to her. He confirms this, but says that when she was no longer a child she didn’t understand/believe it anymore so she could no longer hear him.
thanks for the ideas but it wasn’t either of those! I’m pretty sure it wasn’t set in a different world, just that children could still hear trees in our world. I’m still looking and driving myself a bit mad every now and then!