The trees at Gernika on market day

The bright light of the stars is dimmed;
A few drops of rain begin to fall.
Now the trees know that Autumn approaches,
And softly from leaf to leaf
The news is whispered.

Yuan Mei
China 18th century

News from BS7...

So here I am in Bristol, in England, in the Land of Eng. For how long I don't know, but right now I feel the excitement of someone who has travelled here from the other side of the globe. I go to college on the other side of town and when ever I can, I cycle. Down the long, long, long, gentle slope of the bustling highstreet known as Gloucester road, past the graffiti buildings of Stokescroft, onto the wide aggressive roads of the centre; BigBusLand. But once over the bridge to Spike island, I whizz my way along the footpath next to the river,  over another footbridge, through Needle Park, around the brick red warehouses turned into arts centres, under-passing large complicated roundabouts heavy with traffic until I get to Bower Ashton just below Ashton Court park. Somehow this route avoids all the many hills of Bristol. Going back in the dark is not so pleasant and so I take my car on the days I think I will stay late, which is most days. But then I get the nicest moment of all. I park my car at the top of the hill above the college in the Ashton court carpark. I've not yet explored Ashton Court  itself but the grounds are full of deer, and Harts of the Wood with their antlers standing proudly erect. And huge trees of some great age standing like weight lifters holding their heavy loads to the sky. And as I walk up the hill at the end of the day, the sun still staining the sky, I turn to look at the wide panorama of Bristol in the distance with the Clifton suspension bridge elegantly crossing the gorge and I think: 

I did it, I'm really here.... 

It's the best moment of the day.

Australian tree dwellers

Koalas have tough pads of skin on their bottoms - they carry around their own cushions!

Kookaburras live in permanent pairs and hatch 2-3 young each year. The juvenile birds help their parents incubate and rear the next generation.

Roble acompañado

Mejor acompañado 1 de Agosto de 2009

Nogalito Silvestre

Sólo en el pueblo. 24 de Julio de 2009

How quickly does a life pass?

Trees stay put until some sod comes along and cuts them down. People transplant themselves. A case study: José, our local car mechanic is about to uproot himself and move to Barcelona. His workshop looks out on a bleak patch of green where only one tree has ever been able to take root. Plodding dogs, vainly marking their territory, have corroded it to the bone. I'll miss him, while the lime tree continues to throw out its blossom with a perfume that puts the neighbourhood to shame. José is as far away from a mechanic as I can imagine, talking about a film you've seen and making you think "Where was I then?"

The trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Philip Larkin
1922-85

A walnut tree in sunlight

A poem

Trees are poems
That earth writes upon the sky
We fell them down
And turn them into paper
That we may record our emptiness

Khalil Ghibran

Taken from BBC Radio 4. "Something understood" The Tree of Life"

painted forest

... y de los árboles

26/4/09

Haya de Irús

El mes de las flores

24/4/09

Jardín de Casa Zalama

a different grip on reality

How trees changed the world

"I WAS completely dumbfounded," says palaeontologist Bill Stein, recalling the moment he first set eyes on the newly discovered fossil. In front of him was an astonishingly well preserved tree, complete with trunk and branches, dating from 385 million years ago. Finding a near-complete fossil tree is rare enough in itself, but this was even more extraordinary. It came from the first forest on Earth.

The long-hoped-for Gilboa tree dates from the middle of the Devonian period (416 to 359 million years ago), a time of explosive evolutionary action among land plants. During this period they evolved from small, primitive forms that would have barely brushed your ankle into genuine trees up to 30 metres tall. And with the evolution of trees, they and all the other plants - hitherto confined to marshy environments - went on to conquer the surface of the planet.

These first forests changed the face of the Earth. Early land plants had already started leaking oxygen into the atmosphere, creating soils and providing food and shelter for animals, and the evolution of trees upped the pace of change. They weathered rocks, made soils deeper and richer, created complex habitats and changed the climate beyond recognition. By the end of the Devonian, an ecologically modern world had appeared.

The best place to catch a glimpse of this primitive terrestrial Eden is in the rolling hills around the village of Rhynie in Aberdeenshire, UK. Here the finely crystallised quartz of the Rhynie chert preserves in extraordinary detail an entire ecosystem that was engulfed and petrified by silica-rich waters from a volcanic spring 410 million years ago. The fossil plants still stand upright, and even their cells remain visible. Tiny creatures such as insects, centipedes, mites, harvestmen and spider-like trigonotarbids are preserved in immaculate detail. Some still cling to the stems on which they lived and died.......

by James O'Donoghue 

For full article see

The Waste Land

THE river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard.  T.S. Eliot

Link to Kew Gardens Tree website 

Woods I once walked

Tim's dad used to live at the Barn house... these are the woods behind it, last seen two years ago...

Tree's Eye View

The advantages of staying still and watching the world change.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

29/3/09


Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs is little room,
About the woodland I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

A.E.Houseman 1859-1936













24/4/09

Wer du auch seist: Am Abend tritt hinaus
aus deiner Stube, drin du alles weißt;
als letztes vor der Ferne liegt dein Haus:
Wer du auch seist.
Mit deinen Augen, welche müde kaum
von der verbrauchten Schwelle sich befrein,
hebst du ganz langsam einen schwarzen Baum
und stellst ihn vor den Himmel: schlank, allein.
Und hast die Welt gemacht. Und sie ist groß
und wie ein Wort, das noch im Schweigen reift.
Und wie dein Wille ihren Sinn begreift,
lassen sie deine Augen zärtlich los . .

Whoever you are, go out into the evening,
leaving your room, of which you know each bit;
your house is the last before the infinite,
whoever you are.
Then with your eyes that wearily
scarce lift themselves from the worn-out door-stone
slowly you raise a shadowy black tree
and fix it on the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world (and it shall grow
and ripen as a word, unspoken, still).
When you have grasped its meaning with your will,
then tenderly your eyes will let it go...

Rainer Maria Rilke

Fallen words

If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.
John Keats 1795-1821

Symbiosis

Fall

It is good to know the truth, but it is better to speak of palm trees

If I were to be reborn, I'd like to be a tree.
A poplar tree has about 45,000 genes compared to the human genome of about 25,000.
The tree form has evolved separately a number of times from unrelated classes of plants. The earliest forms were tree ferns, horsetails and lycophytes.
The oldest tree, an African Baobab, is probably 6,000 years old.
How does time pass for a tree? Or maybe it's a thought it can do without.
Perhaps Immanuel Kant is right when he says: from such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.
Do trees communicate? I suppose that depends on what you're listening for.
There's research published on the way that plants interrelate via the rhizosphere - see, for example How plants communicate using the underground information superhighway which gives evidence that complex, root multitude exudates play a role in root-root and root-microbe communication.
In a similar vein, scientists have discovered that bacteria talk to each other - see Bonnie Bassler's TED talk.
And from another point of view, Buddha attained enlightment after meditating under the Bodhi tree, then spent a whole week afterwards staring at it in gratitude.