quieted, housed (oak time)

Over the past three years or so, I have photographed this oak tree many times from the same position, tracking its changes and the shifts in the weather. It's on a regular cycling and walking route; and pretty much every time I pass, I look at it and take a picture. There are dozens of them now. An archive of tree(s). 

 

I think of it as 'my' oak, although of course it isn't. Somehow it has acquired a particular place in my affections - a moving still point, always there. An enduring continuity. A kind of axis mundi. When someone close has passed away, I have placed some rose petals from the garden (dried or fresh, depending on the season) in a little hollow at the base of its trunk ...

 

Beginning last October, this chronological sequence records something of the past year in the life of the oak, autumn to the end of summer, with one image for each month. Twelve trees, the same tree. 

 

*****

 

‘Occasionally, in a moment of peaked emotion ... we will truly see something, a tree, an animal, a neighbourhood, a loved one, in their idiosyncratic actuality, as we suspect they truly are, and we are overwhelmed, while quieted, housed, by the detail of their being. Before this moment of recognition, they existed, of course, but now they stand out with an aching clarity, which seems at once identity and a notion of our relationship to it' ... Tim Lilburn, The Larger Conversation: Contemplation and Place, 2017

 

plant intelligence (the architecture of trees)

‘A tree breathes without lungs, feeds without a mouth, digests without a stomach, sees without eyes, hears without ears and, most exceptional of all, reasons, communicates, and solves problems without a brain. It is even able to remember and solve problems more effectively each time they arise. That is, it is capable of learning. It is all this without having a brain, or something similar, to which these tasks can be delegated. In other words, trees do not have a centralised organisation, everything in them is spread out and not delegated to specific organs. We could define their structure as modular ... 

In a sense, the way they are structured is the quintessence of modernity: they have a modular, cooperative & distributed structure without command centres, able to perfectly withstand catastrophic & repeated predation without losing functionality. They are basically every engineer’s dream. Next time you look at a tree, stop & think about it’ 

From ‘Plant Intelligence’ by the plant neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso

Photographs of Somerset trees in winter by David Williams