Urban Trees

Southampton, Seymour Road

Yes, yet another backfile project has been keeping me busy: urban trees, this time. As I looked through my files digging out the "postcards", I kept noticing photographs of trees in urban contexts, at home and abroad, which I'd never done anything with. It had never occurred to me that this was a primary theme of my photographic activity, but there it is, 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.

Paris, Place de la Concorde

This is especially evident in an urban context. Sure, there are trees in most European cities, but they are mainly tame trees on a leash – undersized, carefully confined by paving, manicured, and arrayed in regular patterns – and not the exuberant, shaggy specimens you find in most English streets, rogue trees that bulge and crack open walls and pavements, and wrap their roots around cable conduits and drains. Not to mention dropping their leaves and seeds all over everything. We once lived in a Bristol street lined with lime trees, which deposited some sticky substance all over any parked cars. This – if not regularly washed off – meant that the continual shower of leaves, seed cases, and other windblown detritus would become firmly glued to the roof and bonnet. My first car, an ancient Mini, rarely moved from its spot, and washing it was very, very low on my list of priorities, with the result that its original smooth, light-blue paintwork gradually vanished beneath the accreted layers, until it looked like a prop from some sci-fi version of Lord of the Rings. The thing is, it would never have occurred to me, or most of our neighbours, I'm sure, that the answer to the problem might be to cut down the trees.

So, comparative urban trees. Another lockdown backfile project that will probably become yet another book of some sort. And I have barely taken a photograph since March...

Southampton, Shirley High Street