Category: Trees

Hatfield Forest & Hatfield Broad Oak

This is one of my favourite trees, an ancient Hornbeam pollard at Bush End Plain, an area of wood pasture in Hatfield Forest. This place has been grazed by cattle and sheep for at least 1000 years, and these trees pollarded to keep their green shoots out of reach of grazing livestock. There are also deer here and Oliver Rackham has called this The Last Forest because it is the only surviving example of a Royal Medieval Hunting Forest, meaning forest as a place where the monarch had the right to keep deer and to kill and eat them. This maintained environment has been shaped with rides, chases and woodland by continuous managed development over the past millenium. Continue reading “Hatfield Forest & Hatfield Broad Oak”

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Alde Valley Spring Festival

The weekend before last we went up to Suffolk to visit the Alde Valley Spring Festival. It’s at White House Farm in Great Glemham where barns and out-buildings are used to display local crafts and artworks. Appropriately Jelly Green‘s lively paintings occupied the former cowshed. Continue reading “Alde Valley Spring Festival”

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The Night Life Of Trees

Last month my daughter gave me this book of magical trees for my birthday. It’s a collection of hand-pulled screenprints on black paper, bound by hand into a gorgeous book where, according to John Berger, “the nightingale sings until morning”. Continue reading “The Night Life Of Trees”

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Signs Of Signs

We recently framed these two images by Pia Gazzola. Above is a digital photograph of bamboo leaves dipped in ink, moved by the wind to draw on the sheet of paper placed beneath them. Below is the drawing they produced. They are from a series of artworks where trees are encouraged to make drawings. Bamboo, strictly speaking is a grass rather than a tree, but with a history of service in providing drawing implements. See more here.

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A Walk From King’s Cross (With Labels)

King’s Cross station has a new concourse, enclosed by a beautiful, sculptural roof which grows from a steel trunk and spreads into a tree-like canopy of intersecting branches. They meet the ground along the semi-circular perimeter, which is a continuation of the arc of the Great Northern Hotel, which was in turn shaped by the curve around a bend of the River Fleet. Continue reading “A Walk From King’s Cross (With Labels)”

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The Beauty Of Mbuti

These beautiful Mbuti barkcloth paintings are part of an exhibition at Raven Row called The Stuff That Matters. I was surprised and delighted by them, and taken back to 1980 when I saw an advertisement in Art In America for an exhibition of Pygmy Drawings at the Linda Einfeld Gallery in Chicago. The illustration struck a chord with me then and I wrote off for a catalogue. Continue reading “The Beauty Of Mbuti”

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In Regents Park

We put the clocks forward last weekend for British Summer Time and it worked. Suddenly it’s summer, in March. Today the temperature was as high as 23 Centigrade in London, that’s about 75 Fahrenheit. There are no leaves on the trees yet, but there is blossom everywhere. Here are two paintings by Mary Kuper of cherry blossom in Regents Park. Continue reading “In Regents Park”

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Elgin Blossoms

Seeing Paul Finn’s Spring Blossoms Umbria reminded me of this painting, Elgin Crescent, Spring, Cherry by Isobel Johnstone, painted from her window down by Ladbroke Grove. Something similar is happening here with the interrupted view through the branches, and the tangle of foreground and background. The streets hereabouts are bursting with blossom now; I can see magnolia and cherry and forsythia. In this little painting I can also see Pollock and Tobey and Mondrian.

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