I’ve just read c.1 ‘Nicholas Hoel’ in ‘Overstory’ and admire how the survival of an ancient chestnut tree is told. Planting trees we need to understand that to achieve one veteran requires a coppice – not all will make it. My thinking has developed over a few year from telling the story of urban trees and how they may grow over a century or more (watercolours) to creating an ink drawing sequence or animation of one or more of the veteran trees I’ve come to know well by taking a drawing and working back to how it grew this way. John Evelyn author of ‘Sylva’ lived in Lewes. He was resident half a mile away (Southover Grange) and the town has been recognised globally as an ‘urban arboretum’. A tree in a garden, like an ancient mulberry in Southover Gardens, can be protected – the fate of a large tree overhanging a road is less certain.
Most days, possibly 200 visits in the last 18 months, I am in the woods of Markstakes Common seeking out recognised veteran and notable trees and logging possible editions, while spotting fungi, and noting other changing patterns: branches lost, trees fallen, damage from deer and squirrels, water courses and ponds.
Photographs can only see so much so I now take a drawing pad – in this way I can isolate a tree from the sometimes dense under-storey and canopy.
I risk wanting to draw every tree, not just the ancients – already I find I am as attracted to the ‘characters’ – badly broken, twisted and fallen survivors that show extraordinary resilience, determination and hope that their moment might come – that by holding on to the last a chance break in the canopy will throw light onto them.
Some then thrive, some only lose to more virulent competitive growth.
From one book comes half a dozen more. I have two burgeoning libraries of books (eBooks and hardbacks) on everything from rewilding to fungi, woodland management to ‘reading trees’.
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