Create A Custom Tree(view) Structure?

I'm looking for a way to create the treeview structure in memory with a classes, so I can loop through them, like with a collection and easily load the data into a treeview, listview, datagridview or simply work with the data in the background.

There's a treenode class that I could use, but I've noticed that when I have a lot of data in the nodes, it has a lot overhead when for example serializing, because it also saves the checked state, imageindex of the nodes and things like that, which I never need. The saved file is about 10 times bigger than the actual data, which is not acceptable.