As I walk around the city centre and other areas, I’m still feeling disturbed by how unloved the trees seem to be, and how it’s sometimes hard to feel their presence even though there are so many of them. It’s different from London, where the trees seem much more present in the streets, even though very often ignored and worse. This may be partly because there are fewer big, old trees, and most of those are in parks rather than on the streets. It’s also to do with the containment I wrote about earlier – as in this photo of a young Turkey oak. Obviously the fencing is for protection, but it also makes the tree very hard to connect with. One of my regular practices with trees has been taking bark rubbings on thin layout paper. I was out doing this yesterday (an exceptionally mild day, with warm sun), and tried to make a rubbing from this tree and others in that street (which is a long row of these young oaks). Although I was just about able to reach, I didn’t feel connected and the rubbings are not as detailed and subtle as the ones I took from a circle of basswoods in a nearby square.
I have an intern working with me, and she has found me a huge database of over 31,000 trees in public space in the city – which is how I’m able to confirm species identification. I’m not interested in this naming in order to pin them down, but I am planning to look more at the origins of the trees and how they got here, as well as the aesthetics of planting, how happy different trees are likely to be where they are, and hopefully, whether local residents have particular feelings about different species. I’m also relying on the expertise of the estimable Paul Wood, who’s an absolute expert on London street trees. He’s already helped me identify a rare urban planting of female ginkgo trees…
The university campus where I’m based is another huge, massively treed area (around 25,000 more trees). There’s a different feel here, with a lot more open space and the trees are mostly in grassy or wooded areas (including an arboretum). But as in the city parks, I’m noticing a lot of ivy on the mature trees. When and if I get to talk to people who look after the trees, I plan to ask about this and whether it’s a conscious decision not to remove it.
I’m heading off now to do some sound recording – it has stopped raining which I’m disappointed about because I wanted to record the sound of rain in the trees/ trees in the rain. But in this extremely mild winter, more rain is very likely…
