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I was a very spastic kid who loved to see how high he could climb a tree. That's just the way I've always been.

I knew everything in the forest. I had a secret home tree, where I pretty much lived. I also liked rooftops and streetlamps. My parents would get calls saying 'He's out there again.'

The tree I had in the garden as a child, my beech tree, I used to climb up there and spend hours. I took my homework up there, my books, I went up there if I was sad, and it just felt very good to be up there among the green leaves and the birds and the sky.

I used to love wildlife as a kid and being outside in the garden and the woods and the field and that stuff.

I was an ambitious child and I tended to be scatterbrained. If I was at school and saw a bird outside the window I wanted to follow it. I was adventurous.

I got stuck up a tree when I was about seven, and my dad had to come and get the ladder to get me down. I loved to climb all the way up to the top. I must have been a koala in my past life.

I've always liked trees. And then, growing up, I took an interest in ecology, hedges being destroyed, the landscape being turned into prairies.

I came from a house full of books, so I took reading for granted. I was an outdoorsy little kid, too, so I got the best of both worlds by taking books up trees and reading there.

I had one of the most outdoorsy childhoods you could imagine. I basically lived in the woods until I was 13. My dad and I built a huge treehouse in our backyard in Chesterfield, about 30 feet in the air. And we'd vacation on an island in Michigan, where I hunted a deer that we ate.

I grew up barefoot, dirty, climbing trees. It made me appreciate things more.