Bianca Thomas is a climbing arborist in the UK, and former molecular biologist who left academia in her late thirties in search of a way of understanding living systems that felt truer to her. After several years living and working on a farm in a remote part of Minas Gerais, Brazil, she retrained in arboriculture and eventually returned to the UK, where she founded the female-led tree care company Girl in a Tree, created so she could work with trees in a way that prioritises restraint, knowledge and long-term care.

She now spends much of her time in the crowns of trees, guided by a fundamental question: why has the tree grown this way? Her approach treats trees as teachers rather than objects to be controlled. Her work has taken her into the canopies of giant sequoias in California, strangler figs and ceiba trees in Belize, and ancient and veteran trees in the UK, studying how trees live, reorganise, adapt and die.

Through writing that bridges cutting-edge science and lived experience at height, Bianca seeks a language that can connect people to trees, and the living world we are all part of. She believes our failure to protect them is often a failure of imagination and vocabulary — and her work is driven by the conviction that when we learn to truly see a tree, we may begin to see ourselves differently.

Connect with Bianca on Instagram and on her Substack.