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
Cernunnos, the horned one, is the Celtic god of the forest. Resplendent in autumn’s riches, this lordly beech seems a worthy successsor, high on the slope with its heavy, curled antler-branches. Beech frequently grows fabulous shapes and it is to emphasise these that I use…
Continue reading Cernnunos -SOLD
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…
Continue reading Ankerwycke
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…
Continue reading Overhang – SOLD
Greenham Common has a variety of habitats, notably a large expanse of heathland with ground-nesting birds, lizards and rare orchids. There are also the fenced-off bunkers (once home, at disparate times, to American Cruise missiles and the D’Qar resistance in Star Wars), a business park…
Continue reading Nest Boxes – SOLD
Four years ago, in March 2016, I found myself driving across Hungerford Common with half an hour or so to spare before I was due to meet some friends in the town. The common is lovely (even on a fairly dull day in March) and…
Continue reading Progenitor
The beech tree is traditionally known as the “queen” of the Forest (oak being the “king”). It seems a fitting epithet: beech grows tall and elegant, with smooth, supple bark and a fabulously coloured wardrobe of leaf colour – from fresh spring greens, though strong…
Continue reading Queen of the Forest – SOLD
This is a real tree. It’s an ancient yew tree (somewhere between 1,500 and 4,000 years old) in the village churchyard of Crowhurst, Surrey. The tree, even by the most conservative estimate of its age, is older than records of the church or of the…
Continue reading The tree with a door
De Narrow Zawn is a tiny inlet in Cornwall’s “tin coast“, a World Heritage site littered with the ruins of old mines for tin, arsenic and copper. In fact, it’s at Botallack, which is probably the best known Cornish tin mining site. If you were…
Continue reading Dynarow Zawn