The Buzzcut of Beech and All
I am days after the Spring Equinox and two familiar Trees are bleeding into the Sky watched by my living room window. I think I am witnessing Beech smearing the stark lines of bare branches into a maroon haze of new growth, and it startles after a Winter of mornings awing at their buzzcut endings, pruned by a great gardener in the Sky.
Have you seen this? With leaves lost and a quietened Sky, deciduous Trees appear to still, their expanse held to a blunt perimeter, as if growing up against an unseen (to human) limit that shapes each crown. Every branch, sub-branch and smaller pauses growth in alignment, outlining their shape, cut and pasted onto Sky. I am fascinated by this Winter familiar and resist reading explanation to hold my wonder.
As a child growing in urban soil, deciduous bare-leaved Trees were my favourite thing to draw. My small right hand would guide favoured graphite to travel the fairytale gnarls and undulations that met a full blaze of Sun or carried deep Snow, both conditions necessary for high contrast and explorations of shading. My Trees were always rendered in section, at close range, it was how I knew Trees. I lived up close to them in a suburb which had long impinged on the trunks of our elders. I saw Trees framed by upstairs windows or playing hide and seek with roofs and chimneys. I played in or under them and my imagination held this perception. I now live in different lands were I am afforded vista and my eyes embrace whole Trees in their glory at distance or in wonder at the statuesque Sycamore that fills every window in our home. The large stumps of its relations in the garden tell of a building that bullied the land.
Once I lived alongside the most beautiful of Trees, a Lime. They certainly weren't the largest Tree grown for display in the eighteenth century manicured landscape of Estate, with aged Oaks and taller flowering Limes nearby, They stood small and separate, self-contained against the path. In leaf or not, close up or viewed from afar, they were the most exquisite symmetry a Tree can surely be, one perfect, bulbous teardrop. It was everything my childhood drawings were not, it was contained and regular, more an early years lollipop drawing than my rebellious forestlings. When one Spring courted a storm it took half the Lime to the ground and the remaining half stood defiant, holding its line like a Broccoli head sliced through its core. The morning after heard much talk of the Lime’s fate and it became known that many people cherished this modest Tree as their favourite. It never did regain its full symmetry on the surviving side, as if the moment of impact had quaked its trajectory askew, the trauma forever recorded like notch in feather.
I mull on the force that wills these sharply defined Tree shapes of Winter and consider human explanations such as balance and support. Is the form found after the Autumnal letting go of the old and deadened, a self pruning of sorts? I have always noticed the buzzcut in the new year, but this may be attributed to my lack of looking rather than a seasonal specific. My brain moves on and ponders the possibility that in Spring the branches are so potent with new growth their tips swell, and what I may be seeing are the emboldened edges of restrained life force and possibility waiting for right condition-place to emerge. I remind myself, everything grows to a visible limit, my own cells form a boundary of skin that professes this is me/this is other - though we know how porous that notion is!
I think of the Trees I find on Dartmoor that are so visibly shaped by elements coming from one direction again and again, moulding strange and compressed, angular forms, held in incredible acts of balance and yet always a visibly cohesive whole. The Beech seen through my window are perfectly inflated, no branch out of place, like the best Friday blow dry ready for their weekend audience. Whether told where to grow or wilded, Trees grow by their will, as a majestic blend of life-force and elements, and I love them all.
Spring is no longer wet behind the ears and the morning air has warmed sufficiently to allow he and me to tentatively approach the small bay of our living room window. It is here we sit, hands warmed by mugs of coffee, to greet the day. The portrait window offers a pictorial framing, occupying the horizon are the Beech, in-front of them the slates of two roofs angled perfectly to draw the eye to what grows closer, a Tree-sized Bay, Pampas Grass and other shrubs that I have yet to identify. At their feet a small, gloriously tufty grassland flourishes with respite from a neighbour’s compulsion of repeatedly strimming the lawn to stubble (I really must speak up this Summer for the Grass and unseen life that we dwell with). The next plane of perspective is narrow and populated by the emergent height of our container grown fruit bushes. The final plane closest to us is the window box he made, underlining the picture of it all.
The window box is holding three clusters of Muscari, four tiny Strawberry plants gifted by runners with crowns full of promise, a self-seeded nasturtium that is already creeping bright green, a solo unidentified bulb gifted in Autumn and now budding with the expectation of Narcissi, and finally, one Cat-shaped, compacted hollow. The negative space of his Cat shape talks pleasingly as the inverse of the Tree shapes. Everything is growing visibly turgid and with a force perhaps enhanced by the coffee grounds I have deposited. Amongst this all, play the shadows of Pigeon flight, small winged creatures and the first glints of Spider silk mapping.
The is-it-blue-is-it-purple of Muscari has enchanted us for some weeks with their otherworldly UV-like glow that is beguiling in any season, but was so arresting in the dawning of Spring. These miniature wonders have courted the first Bees, held magical spheres of Rain on every grape, survived the Cat’s lounging and now bow out with a quickening brown, their time spent. And what of all the new leaves in the box that I have so far disregarded? A compulsion to quench my Winter thirst with the colour pop of flowers overlooks the leaves which have long fountained with decisive, bold strokes to the light, a verdant green/blue of vitality and vigour. The Chinese name this colour Qing, a fluid and complex mix of green, blue and sometimes black that can be attributed to much in nature, sometimes less an exact hue and more speaking to the life force and delight it instigates.
Our window is our sit spot with each morning’s marvels. He, never a gardener, is now seduced by the continual change that rewards our attention. This small framing of the living world allows us to deeply notice and witness the incredible growth of Spring. Perhaps this satisfies our modern human sensibilities that have been conditioned to hold growth as the motivating force of life? However it won’t be so long before we migrate to the other side of the glass and meet dawn and a slower pace if we allow ourselves to linger.
By the time I have found adequate words to express what I noticed of the Beech, they have already shifted to a more softened and looser shape and I will have to patient until Autumn to observe their skeletons once more. The picture framed by window is also shifting, the background now softened, allowing the fore to court attention.