Well, this is the last day of Tree Love week. It’s been fantastic.
We asked people anywhere to do creative actions to express love for trees, and to share them on their own profiles as well as on Facebook and Twitter. The contributions are still coming in. 267 people joined the event on Facebook. Lots of pro-tree organisations blogged or spread the word, including the Woodland Trust, the Tree Council, Trees for Life, Westonbirt Arboretum and Save Our Woods.
Nigel Rayment organised a special event in St Margaret’s Square in Brockley – neighbours created tribute sculptures and poems to their favourite trees.
Persephone Pearl organised a be-ribboning of the Elm trees in Elm Grove, Brighton, survivors of Dutch Elm disease.
There is some photographic evidence that a hare and a slightly more mysterious woodland creature ventured into some London woods to spread some tree love.
Cathy Fitzgerald gave a talk on Valentine’s Day about forests, love and deep sustainability.
James Aldridge shared his appreciation of Arboglyphs.
I organised a Tree Love printmaking workshop for home educated children, led by artist Lisa Cradduck.
Kay Haw who writes the Woodland Matters blog wrote some lovely posts, such as this one about a marriage that came about due to shared love of trees, and invited people to submit their creative works about trees.
Warren Draper couldn’t stop sharing tree love photos on his blog.
Paul Conneally wrote a haiku and found lots of ways of making his week’s activities tree-love themed.
Cat Lupton painted some heart paintings to give to an English oak and Norwegian maple, and went walking round Berlin to take photos of favourite trees (and also shared this about special individual trees in Berlin).
Michael Holt and Steve Cox (Mr Love & Justice) both submitted songs, one of which came with an invitation to create a visual accompaniment to.
Tim Wright expressed love in an unconventional way, buying a Harvest Geek monitoring system to care for and communicate with his Compote tree.
So many people shared so many photos of and poems to their favourite trees or woods, some of which are gathered here in this Storify, and some of which are on this Tree Love Week event page. There were also lots of conversations about pruning, about trees and health, about funding for tree planting, about orchards, about places you can learn tree skills. Many of these links were shared by Dmitri Launder, the Artist Gardener and Arbonaut. Dan Harvey (of Ackroyd and Harvey) told us about the RE:LEAF London awards, organised by the Forestry Commission which has a creative category for artworks about trees.
There was a great deal of sweetness and light, as the signs of Spring emerged throughout the week. But it wasn’t all that sweet: Some of the acts of tree love we heard about were about resistance to, or sadness about, tree felling for development. The Combe Haven defenders lovingly cradled a felled tree and delivered it to East Sussex County Council. Then, Donnachadh McCarthy reported that 45 mature trees had been chopped in Burgess Park, Peckham, to make way for a BMX track.
There’s no need for Tree Love to end. There’s every reason to keep it up. Love for trees is…simply appreciating them for their own sake, and it is also recognising their value because we and other species are dependent on them. Next month we can appreciate them through Tree Play Month.
Bring it on!
