A Love Letter to Trees

 The trees have their own story. Some of them have been there so much longer than we have been there and will be there to outlive all of us. You lose that sense of time and you're suddenly surrounded by all these new smells and those sounds of the birds and the sounds of those branches when they creak. It just is like a whole amazing thing for the senses. That's what you should try. You should try to get that feeling of the mystery of it.

 Zafar Kunial, a poet says, “Whenever I walk into the woods, I always feel that I am entering into a different pattern of time or something. The way light is chopped up by the leaves. It feels like the moment itself is chopped up a little bit and lots of different moments are almost held within the envelope of that little forest in quite a magical way.”

 It's actually quite hard to envisage an environment without trees and their habitats and what they mean and how they behave. It's a rich, creative world and I can't think that anybody's life is worse off for having trees in it. Part of improving it for wildlife is increasing the number of trees. Because trees do quite useful things, don't they? Anyone got any ideas what trees do?” Says Mad Adams( Archaeologist).  

 “We as Muslims believe we are custodians, caretakers of the Earth. So, we're hoping that by planting a tree, we will benefit the Earth and it will preserve it for future generations. If a Muslim plants a tree, and a bird, an animal or a child benefits from it then it will be classed as a charitable act. And it's an act that doesn't stop - it can carry on even till the hereafter” says Riana Abbas(Bolton Council of Mosques).

 “Trees connect with memories and with time. And maybe even learning about time. A is for Apple. A is for Acorn. There is some dim connection between alphabets, trees, books and leaning in my head. Some are particularly interested in the relationship between people and trees. I probably know a few hundred trees in the plantation. I revisit the same tree and think, " How are you today? Are you springtime yet? I want to know when the tree first produces its flowers. It's like a farmer having lambs. It's that same thrill of seeing new life, isn't it?” says Max Adams.

“I have to try and get this right because it's a really good quote about nature.

"Still, nature is the fountain's head, the source from whence all must originally spring and should an artist continue his practice without referring to nature he must soon form a manner,” John Constable says.

And that's what, I was finding, was happening with my work. I was like, "Actually my work is incredibly mannered." 

“So I went into the middle of the rainforest and did a residency in a jungle. And didn't intend on it becoming the whole rest of my practice...well not forever, but up until now. And just fell in love with these landscapes. And I came home and after being in this place where my eyes were completely opened to the twists of the branches and the curls of the leaves, and when I was looking at my own landscape and all these woodlands around me, it was like I was looking at them for the first time. And so it continued this inspiration that I had to paint them,” Jelly Green says.

 “It was Monday, Bank Holiday, near the end of the May, rough middle of the day,  year and of the country if the country is England. Oak apple or oak and nettle day, axis of my year thinly plotted as my tree - the far end of our thinning garden, in a border shaped to waver like a child's drawing of sea. Its clock-handed Y where the trunk parted ways, a first rung, that even just turned seven I step onto, into the above, this wobbly earth above earth. Wordlessly I knew then, I'd later be gone, like possibly my tree has, from that border, and my attention divided thinly as the light, or is that time, through the green-grey space I was sitting in as I reached up for a branch, or is it balance, or vantage? On this tentative level. A story," Zafar Kunial says.