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

a recollection of dry fire

A long bike trip with Sue to Kensal Green cemetery in North London, in search of something I first read about some year's ago in Iain Sinclair's Lights Out For The Territory. His account of a particular encounter in the 1990s, en route to a funeral with his friend the photographer Marc Atkins, has lingered with me. 

Initially Sinclair is dismissive of the pretensions of some of the cemetery's inhabitants, their 'pyramids and stone mansions whose original pomposity had been weathered by long indifference into something more democratic: a sanctuary for wild nature, a trysting place for work-experience vampires. Irrelevant memory doses. Boasts and titles and meaningless dates'. Then -

"I spotted one particular stone angel that had to be photographed: a robed hermaphrodite tangled in the bare Medea branches of a tree. The image was entirely mythical. The tree devoured the stone like a recollection of dry fire. Like Actaeon, the voyeur, turned into a stag: trapped, as it were, by the wonder of a site unexpectedly encountered. Like Ezra Pound's obsession with the girl who becomes a tree:

            The tree has entered my hands,
            The sap has ascended my arms,
            The tree has grown in my breast -
            Downward,
            The branches grow out of me, like arms.

The angel's hands were gone, her face was hidden; the branches spread out above her like electrified hair. Her wings, tangled in the thicket, were a useless decoration ..." (350).

There are countless angels in Kensal Green cemetery, immobile flocks of them in varying states of eroded, gravitied flight, but Thomas Raphael's winged companion was nowhere to be found. Eventually we met a passing 'friend' of the cemetery, who explained that the tree had died some time ago, and the masonry of the angel itself had been significantly damaged. He offered to show us what remained. I thanked him and declined, for it seemed most fitting to retain Sinclair's account of his Ovidian encounter and Atkins' photograph as the enduring mnemonic traces of a vision now disappeared - an active vanishing.

Text extract from Iain Sinclair, Lights Out For The Territory, London: Granta, 1997. Photo: Marc Atkins

monochrome (palermo)

From the top: Via Maqueda, evening passeggiata; overturned chair, with mountain; 'Lo Stato'; Giacomo Serpotta stucco wall; giant ficus in Piazza Marina; evening fishing, La Cala

wood (for the trees)

Am just beginning work with the designer Kevin Mount on a new book, about Lone Twin's Boat Project, and immersing myself in wood as a material - in Chinese culture, conceived as the 'fifth element' - and related readings, all of them unfamiliar and wholly fascinating. Colin Tudge's The Secret Life of Trees, Roger Deakin's Wildwood: a journey through trees, George Nakashima's The Soul of a Tree, Harvey Green's Wood: Craft, Culture, History, R. Bruce Hoadley's Understanding Wood, and, for a wider discussion about the histories and tacit knowledges of the craft of making something well, Richard Sennett's extraordinary book The Craftsman.

Working my way through the catalogue of the 1,200 odd donations of wood made to the Boat Project, I've assembled an initial listing of the kinds of wood that will be present in this exquisitely crafted floating archive of objects and stories:

aframosa, American white oak, apple, ash, bamboo, beech, birch, boxwood, cedar, cherry, chestnut, crab apple, douglas fir/pine, ebony, elder, elm, eucalyptus, fuchsia, hawthorn, hazel, holly, iroko (African 'teak'), iron bark, juniper, kauri, laylandii, lime, mahogany, maple, monkey puzzle, oak, olive, padauk (African wood), parana pine, pear, pine, plum, plywood, redbeckia, redwood, rosewood, Russian oak, sandalwood, sapele (African wood), satin wood, sequoia, silver birch, spruce, strawberry tree, sycamore, teak, walnut, willow, yew.

In the last couple of weeks, I have also enjoyed stimulating email exchanges with Bryan Saner in Chicago, and the British furniture designer Matthew Burt who conceives of wood as 'recycled sunshine and rainwater'. A couple of days ago, Matthew described to me at some length his enduring fascination with and enthusiasm for the 'end grain of timber':
 
"It looks into the time taken to grow the material and each tree has its own unique narrative. I have one piece whose entire front is made of lots of small blocks of end grain. This particular tree was growing out of a bank alongside a track in Somerset. It curved towards the sun and as a consequence had a large “belly” at its front. It fell down in a storm, toppling forwards, no longer able to support its ample belly; it was subsequently sawn, and revealed annular rings/ growth rings that were about 13mm apart in this front part of the tree. The rings at its back side, where it took the strain, were only 2mm apart.

Solitary grown ash trees often pick up nutrients in their old age that begin to discolour their grain. These colours often add interest to the timber, and in the case of these old ashes they impart a greenish brown series of streaks which timber merchants, not slow to embellish their product with silky marketing words, refer to as “olive” and then charge twice as much as normal ash. This tree was very olived and because it was straining to support its considerable belly, the back part of the tree had stress ripples running through its grain. The tree was also curved because of its hungry pursuit of the sun. Hence this tree was olived, curved, rippled with hugely varying widths of growth rings. A story in itself.

Add to this that it had been growing in this spot since the battle of Trafalgar and you begin to get a feel how precious this material is. So when you look at the end grain blocks that make up the front panel of the “bench chest” made out of this particular tree, you are looking into the time taken to grow this wood and the story it tells. In some ways the piece is a memorial to the tree, and hopefully an eloquent one.

Enough".