TREES

  This is my cousin and his dog Ruby looking at the tree I am about to plant. This was at the Hilfield Friary event on Saturday where we were celebrating 100 years of the Friary by having a tree planting day. The Friars have been there since 1921 and my grandmother was very fond of them. When I was a child we would go to the tiny church and she would sing hymns loudly. My mother was Mary in the nativity there.  Lots of people were there and when we got our tree we all got a tag to put round it. By some strange co-incidence I was number 1 tag. I took my tag and my small tree with its roots and my cousin Bill came with his spade and we found a nice spot, marked with a post. half way up the hill. I tried to make an incision into the ground but it was hard work, I had to stand on the spade. A nice volunteer called Greta came along and tried to help - it was clear she didn't know much about tree planting. I managed to do a cut that lifted a chunk of turf up and eventually a hole wa...

 I helped to plant this tree in 1973 with my dad and my grandad and some other volunteers.  Dad said we were given an oak and a beech whip and were told to plant them alternately . I have watched them grow for nearly 50 years, they have never looked healthy.  The government initiative was  a response to a new strain of Dutch Elm disease that decimated elm trees to such an extent that you rarely see them today.  It was like Covid for trees.   Christmas is nearly upon us and I'm feeling the urge to take a break.  I want to think about tinsel and food and family.  I'm enjoying this project and gradually I can feel something emerging that  feels a little like a place for me.  Somewhere between time and timbucku to reference Kurt Vonnegut. I am nestling into something.  My problem from the start is an issue with the potential futility of it all.  This goes back to a feeling I have about the scale of the problems we are facing ...

 This picture is from the storm before last.  A part of the trunk of this tree is now a bench in the cemetery I sat on it today.  Me and Alice used to call this spit tree because once I sniffed and spat near it.  For years we both ritually spat on it when we walked past it.  I would say lets turn up here and go past spit tree.  When you are a kid trees become landmarks in a very personal way, I had a pair tree down my lane and larger trees would become things like "the tree with the rope swing" or the tree where we found the dead squirrel with the face." or the tree where I took my shoes off to go for a poo."  Trees became individuated and folded into a personalized landscape of events, the singular event of growing up.  When my dad left school he was a feller of trees using only an axe for 6 months. The skill he learnt then never left his body.  I watched him ably cut through a tree root when he helped to bury my dog a couple of years ago....

 This time last year we were writing the bid - it went in on the 15th December 2020.  I remember that time as a time of chaos and hardship with bubbles bursting and children jumping around rooms with rainbows.  I re-read the bid quite a lot - it is a document of hope written in a desperate time.  This is my Christmas Tree and below is my favourite section of the bid: Guess who wrote this? This is now a Christmas quiz with prizes. 

  I like the trees in my cemetery, they are well established but also  quite wild.  The cherries are small and British really just a Pit with a skin on them but the birds seem to like them.  As you walk in there is a line of large London Plane I used to think these were a type of Sycamore becuase of the leaves but I know better now.   I was thinking today about all our projects and remembering a conversation where we decided that things worked well when the people involved could own their ideas and that these ideas were not fixed.   Language as Talisman, the archive of exile, Artists studio, fishing as wisdom.  All the titles are quite provocative yet open enough for them to evolve different meaning for different people. I was thinking if treescapes held this ambiguity and then I started to consider my own personal relationship to trees.  How I encounter them, what they mean to me and how actually important they are to the living of a go...

  We have just been to the North East and storm Arwen had blown down loads of trees.  I kept wanting to stop and photograph them for the tree project but didn't get around to it.  When we were leaving I photographed this tree trunk on the beach. It reminded me of a work by the artist David Nash called " free range sculpture"   Nash carved a boulder shape out of a tree trunk and pushed it from the top of a waterfall. he then follows it's journey over a number of years as it makes its way to the sea.  I think this is a nice work of art, art that makes you see the world slightly differently after you have experienced it.  When I passed all the fallen trees I did think about how much carbon must be about to be released into the atmosphere as all the timber rots and is burnt on fires.  I like to think of storms as natural phenomena, I like to think as humans as natural phenomena. This orientation is something that eco feminist new materialism helps with, Ka...