A few years ago, I was given the chance to visit the poet WS Merwin at his home in a rewilded palm jungle in Maui. This was an author who lived what he wrote more than most nature writers, buying up 19 acres of denuded pineapple plantation in the 1970s and then planting a tree a day for 40 years until he possessed one of the largest collections of palms in the world. An editor commissioned me to go out to Hawaii to interview Merwin. I was at that stage, though, when my children were small and required ferrying to school, and there were more immediate calls on my time both personal and professional, and when I finally got around to following up on the commission, I found out that Merwin was ill. He died in March 2019. I never made it to Maui.
I’ve built up a haphazard but important list of tree poems over the past 18 months. It’s the puritan in me, but walks during lockdown needed to be about more than just exercise. I taught my children how to identify wildflowers, birdsong; I taught them to know and love trees. And whenever we reached the midpoint of our walk, in the heart of the ancient wood that marks the bounds of our village, we’d stop for a moment, and I’d read a poem. In winter it was dark and rattling in the wood, in spring the deepest hornbeam green. In autumn we sat on softly glowing mounds of leaves.
I read them “Place” by Merwin. I read Mary Oliver’s “When I Am Among Trees” – “I would almost say they save me, and daily.” When Mary Oliver died, I read the kids “When Great Trees Fall” by Maya Angelou – “We can be. Be and be/ better. For they existed.” When my friend Niko died in a bleak and miry January, I read them Auden’s “Woods” – “A culture is no better than its woods.” On a bright and gusty Easter morning, I read them Housman’s great meditation on the cherry tree – “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now/ Is hung with bloom along the bough” – and in that poem of loss and youth I saw my children ageing, saw them growing like trees will grow – in great bursts and then the years where they would hardly seem to change at all. I wondered if they’d come to this wood (or one like it) when I was gone. If they’d plant a tree for me.
“During my time living in Jerusalem I came to love the landscape of the West Bank which surrounds the city. Within that landscape the olive trees represent both the past and the future somehow, but once there are all gone the future will disappear with them. This particular tree was in the ‘no man’s land’ between the Palestinian city of Bethlehem and the settlement of Har Homa near Jerusalem but in the West Bank. I say ‘was’ because it was removed in 2012 for the expansion of the settlement. Many of these trees date back to Biblical times, and as building work in the West Bank continues more and more are being lost to development. I photographed as many as I could during my years there. I know it is a futile work and the pictures cannot replace the trees, but somehow I know I must continue with the work.”
“This photo was taken in late spring 2019 in Memphis. I was interested in the contrast of man-made and nature. The manicured grass, concrete and the pink blossoms covering the pavement almost like carpet. The off symmetry and opposing colours (pink/magenta being the opposite end of the colour wheel to green) unsettles yet satisfies the eye. I enjoy the duality.”
“Plants and trees have taught me true sustainability, what it means for nothing to be wasted in a constant cycle of reciprocity. A plant will grow, flower, die, rot down into the earth to give life for another plant to grow and on and on. Seeing that cycle and knowing we are part of that beautiful muddle feels like a miracle. Plants slow me down. To feel connected with plants and trees you have to slow right down and be really present... sort of like daydreaming..”
It is a simple thing, the planting of a tree. When my grandfather, whom I loved very much, died, I planted a Princeton maple in my garden. I remember walking with him through the dappled light in front of Nassau Hall in Princeton and the maple leaves were as large as handkerchiefs as they waved on the trees, and I scarcely knew that they were waving goodbye. My maple tree is two years old now, has lived through half a dozen storms and a parched summer. It will outlive me, outlive my children, it will still be pushing its roots down into Wealden clay when there is no one alive who remembers me.
Two passages from Richard Powers’s beautiful book The Overstory come to me each time I pass the maple. “A forest knows things,” Powers writes. “They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware.” Our forests are aware of what we are doing to them. Think what they must say about us, these humans whose greed and stupidity is destroying the world we share.
“This is not our world with trees in it,” another passage goes. “It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.” The trees were here before us, they will be here long after we are gone. Planting a tree looks back as well as forwards. It is symbolic of endurance, yet terribly fragile, a paradox of leaf and bark and sap. It feels like it is not enough, to plant a single tree, but if a whole village, a town, a country did it, we might pull the Earth back from the brink. Imagine if we were the ones who made the difference. Imagine, generations from now, when we are all dead but the trees are not yet old, if the beautiful, tree-covered Earth was green again. Think what the trees would say about us then, in their secret subterranean voices..
“I find it difficult to say something specific about this picture; words limit it, because it is so specific in everything it is and so open in what feelings it evokes in different people. Living in London, I wanted to explore my relationship in nature to gender, sex, clothes.”
“From birth in Nigeria we’re told to invest in our future. A big thing my mother always told me was to buy land. I’ve been financially independent since 17. I had been saving every dollar since then. I grew up with Nigerian and Ghanaian influence. So during the pandemic I went to Ghana to buy land. In the future I want to create a botanical garden or country home. Also a place where people from the west or wherever can come to relax, sip some tea and relax their mind. It’s less than an hour from Accra. I want to grow as many trees as possible. I want it to look cinematic and green from each corner of your eyes.”
“I wake up in the morning asking myself what can I do today, how can I help the world today. I believe in what I do beyond a shadow of a doubt. I gave my word to this tree and to all the people that my feet would not touch the ground until I had done everything in my power to make the world aware of this problem and to stop the destruction.”
“I remember as a child being fascinated by how my grandfather could predict the weather by simply looking at the clouds, observing the wind or the colours of the sunset. He knew how to grow trees and where to find spring water and the best mushrooms. I guess he sparked my interest in nature. I just wanted to be able to read nature like he did. The Plant was born out of curiosity. We want to celebrate nature but also to establish a conversation with artists and photographers to explore the different ways we perceive and interpret the natural world.”
“Working with plants has made me much more aware of the enormous power of nature. I use this power to create my work. Through the dynamics of root growth, the material weaves itself. ”