Exposed tree roots fascinate me. They are secrets revealed, intricately interwoven, the manifold anchors for massive entities – and the forest’s unexpected means of communication. These beech roots cascade down the steepest of slopes while the trees that they belong to do their best to…
Continue reading Chorus Line – SOLD
I went out for a walk to visit a mermaid and came across a field full of mediterranean miniature donkeys. The mermaid was a carving on the door-surround of the tiny Norman church of St. Swithun’s in Nately Scures, near Hook in Hampshire. She’d lost…
Continue reading Donkey Throng – SOLD
I tried something a little bit different with this one. It seemed to have an awful lot of stuff going on on the ground. In the foreground, this was kind of okay; the leaf litter included large sweet chestnut leaves that made it all quite…
Continue reading Recurve
This is a celebration of the less obvious. Hedges around fields are a commonplace feature of the English landscape and, while I think most of us are aware of their importance in terms of diversity and wildlife, we probably don’t think too hard about the…
Continue reading Hedgerow
A woodbank is a linear boundary around or within a wood, marked by a low earthen bank. It’s a feature often associated with ancient woodland, and it’s not uncommon to find trees growing on it. These two trees, an ash and a silver birch, are…
Continue reading Woodbank
This is the third in the “mini-series” of close-ups (Beyond, depicting an ancient oak tree, was the first, followed by Coalesce, which showed an ancient sweet chestnut). This tree isn’t ancient (but it probably got to a decent age for its species, which I think…
Continue reading Echo Chamber
(framed)
Danebury Hill, between Andover and Stockbridge in Hampshire, has featured in my work before (most recently in Deep Dark Wood). It is topped with a significant iron age hill fort, managed by the county council, and is blessed with many lovely trees, most of which…
Continue reading Shaded Path
This is one of my favourite leaning hornbeams, but rather than focussing on the echoing angles of the trees looking down the line (as in Conduit), my attention was drawn to the ravaged remnant of a former tree, the stump in the foreground. The characteristic…
Continue reading Stumped
This beech tree – part of the row along the wood bank at Snelsmore Common that featured in Epic and Babes in the Wood – has an exceptional collection of burrs and galls on it (these are growths caused by stress such as physical damage…
Continue reading Reciprocate