Tenacious holly, with its smooth, pale bark, is a great tree for growing interesting shapes; I can see several fantastic beasts in the roots of this tree. But the overall shape puts me in mind of a tentacled sea monster, floating in a sea of…
Continue reading Tentacular – SOLD
Like many trees growing on the steep cliffs and banks of the sunken road, this ash has extended its root system sideways. The sturdiness of those roots and the way that they disappear into fissures in the bedrock is remarkable and tells of adaptability and…
Continue reading Lateral
A narrow, single track road, lower than the fields it travels through, has steep, cliff-like sides, taller than a car, taller than a person. In many places, the pale, chalky bedrock is exposed. Trees grow atop these sides and their roots either delve through fissures…
Continue reading Firmament
This multimasted grown-out hedge looms above a sunken road from its farmyard setting. Someone has added a car tyre, and to my eye this is a porthole to the tree’s dream: to sail the high seas! Galleon Indian ink on kaolin-coated board, 16″ x 12″…
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Indian ink on kaolin-coated board, 16″ x 12″ Hornbeams in Sandleford Wood, Greenham Common.
Natural erosion of the chalky soil frequently reveals the roots of trees on the Hampshire hangers, but this beech is an extreme case. Immense, intriguingly intertwined, the muscular, naked root structure forms an intricate lattice roof over an intimate hollowed-out cavern. Somebody has fetched branches…
Continue reading Palisade – SOLD
The Ankerwycke Yew is, according to tradition, the tree beneath which King John signed the Magna Carta. It certainly could have been – it is old enough and in the right sort of place – but we may never know for sure. It’s a very…
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Overhang was worked up using photographs that I took a couple of years ago near the hamlet of Empshott Green in Hampshire. It’s a small place, accessed by small, steep roads set into pale, friable cliff faces of malm rock. These cliffs, riven with tree…
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Almost directly opposite the tree featured in Underash is another mature ash tree whose roots stand proud of the ground. It’s not so high up, but it is a very interesting shape, with thick stems of ivy twisting around it and exposed flints in the…
Continue reading Bindings – SOLD
One of the blessings of lockdown was the necessity of restricting my explorations to the local area. It seemed as if the whole village and its dog were heading out along the more obvious paths into the (rather lovely) local hills, and so I went…
Continue reading Underash – SOLD