URBAN TREES
As I looked through my backfiles digging out images for another project, I kept noticing photographs of trees in urban contexts, at home and abroad. It had never occurred to me that this was a primary theme of my photographic activity, but there it was, undeniably. I take a lot of pictures of trees in streets, squares, and odd architectural corners. It seems I'm a tree guy. Which marks me, I think, as essentially English.
When you fly home from abroad, one of the first things you notice as the plane dips below cloud level and the land below resolves into a more human scale of interest is that southern England is a forest. Certainly, a forest interrupted and divided by roads and fields and houses and factories and out of town shopping malls and all the rest of it, but a forest nonetheless. Trees dominate the landscape, and in summer entire suburbs lie half-hidden beneath a canopy of leaves. This is in stark contrast with much of north-west Europe, which is essentially either a bog or a treeless billiard-table of tiny fields. Clearly, the relationship of the English to our arboreal co-habitees is rather different to that of our French, Belgian, or Dutch neighbours. Thankfully the Channel is wide enough to avoid any complaints from them about our overgrown trees blocking their afternoon sunlight.
