THE NEWSPAPER for TREES , WOODS and PEOPLE Midsummer Dreams Issue | Summer 2016 | Free

midsummer dreams issue | summer 2016 | free SHAKESPEARE'S TREES & FORESTS, ANCIENT WOODS, TREE MAPS, CITY TREES, THE NEWSPAPER FOR TREES WOODS AND PEOPLE UNICORNS, YOUR TREE STORIES, AND MORE! , ‘Hasting Tree Map’ by Eleanor Taylor ‘Hasting Tree LEAF! | MIDSUMMER DREAMS e need trees and woods. WThey sustain and enrich our lives, and in return we borrow words from them to express ourselves – how we feel rooted in places or sometimes need to turn over a new leaf, or how we learn from trees of knowledge and belong to family trees. We also name places after trees and woods – think of Sevenoaks in Kent, Maplestead in Essex, Ashmore in Dorset, or the Seven Sisters in Bristol named after pine trees on Durdham Down. Trees and woods are part of where we live and who we are. Little wonder, when we consider the great transformative power of woods and trees. Something happens when we step below a Editor canopy of leaves and branches, a kind of Adrian Cooper magic lifts up from the leaf-shade dappling Art Direction the forest floor. And when we climb trees Gracie Burnett our perspective changes, literally and Cover Artist metaphorically, a different view brings with Ellie Taylor it a different mood, a different feeling. Resident Storyteller But this knowledge isn’t new. Our Martin Maudsley ancestors knew it. That’s why so many Resident Artist Alice Pattullo place names and folk stories are inspired by woods and trees. William Shakespeare Illustration Romy Blumel knew it too, which is why he wrote trees Barry Falls and woods into plays like Macbeth and Rose de Borman As You Like It. It is also why he chose a Bea Forshall woodland setting for A Midsummer Night’s Elena Arevalo Melville Dream when he started writing it in 1590, Common Ground Art Collection a woodland play populated by fairies and Inspired by the community tree mapping feature in spring LEAF! Rose de Borman has been in touch from Tottenham, north London, with a community tree map. On it she has marked the special and Photography magic and moods which shapeshift along important trees growing in the streets where she lives, including the nearby Seven Sisters named after Graham Shackleton with the identities of the characters. Colin Varndell seven elms planted around a walnut tree on common land. Rose’s wonderful map shows that even This transformative power still fires our in densely populated cities like London, the history and lives of trees and people are entwined. Why Design imaginations and inspires wonder today. Common Ground not collect the stories and map the trees in your community? What would a map of the trees in your Little Toller Books It also means that trees and woods will community look like? What stories would they tell? Make sure you send us what you make and tell us always have the power to change people. what you hear along the way! Find out more about tree mapping at Font treecharter.uk Sabon & Alice New The many wonderful tree stories and maps sent to us in response to the spring Printing issue of proves just how important Mortons Print, Lincolnshire LEAF! trees and woods still are to body and Plane, buddleia, fig: award-winning memory I tip the sleepy, crawling bee into my Paper mind. But how can we ensure that future poet Martha Sprackland introduces brother’s palm. In the dream, I place the umber 50% FSC and 50% recycled weight of a buddleia flower there instead, so generations feel the same way? We asked us to some of London’s residents. Distributed by this question of different people – teachers, he isn’t stung. Yearly we cut it back, hard. But The Woodland Trust come first light and warmth new slender shoots Little Toller Books poets, mental-health workers, artists – and the various replies they gave us, along with would leap from the stump as decisively as those Published by your tree stories, are the inspiration for this CITIZEN TREES London varieties – purple buddleia davidii, rather Common Ground than my familiar buddleia globosa – spring from Lower Dairy Midsummer Dreams issue. Walking through Bloomsbury on my way to work, the pockets of soil in the nooks and crannies of Toller Fratrum Please keep sending us stories. Tell us Dorset DT2 0EL past ornamental cherry in St George’s Gardens, the city. It seems we can’t hold all this nature commonground.org.uk about particular trees or cherished woods. sugary box hedge in Bloomsbury Square, T. S. at bay. London is a constantly regenerating The Woodland Trust Tell us about your hopes and dreams for Eliot’s yew in Russell Square, my eyes stream and beast, endlessly renewing like the buddleia itself, Kempton Way trees and woodlands in the future. Tell Grantham my throat prickles and crawls with the fibrous, greening and throwing out new branches. And Lincolnshire NG31 6LL us what you have made from wood and woodlandtrust.org.uk fluffy dust of London plane. These airborne for all the fresh, clean concrete, the sinuous why you enjoyed making it. But most particles, loosed by the trees that line these streets, curved glass and chromium of the skyscrapers, importantly don’t forget to get out this LEAF! © COMMON GROUND 2016 float deceptively, glamouring the air with barely no matter how much is paved over, filled in, built summer! Why not join the Big Butterfly perceptible Van Gogh-like swirls of movement. on, the plants colonise an oasis, or find a way to COMMON GROUND is an Count or host a tree party? Why not Irritant, unshiftable, they gather deep in the leap up through the fissures and cracks, or make arts and environmental build a den every day for a week? Or charity working both locally eye-corners, chafe the tear-ducts, travel across their own – roots erupting from black tarmac like and nationally to seek new, stroll down your neighbourhood streets my vision like birds. Like the plane trees, the science fiction. imaginative ways to engage people with their local environment and to find a wishing tree. Wherever you live, opportunist buddleia cast their tiny seed into the On Amwell Street in Finsbury, near where I have celebrate the intimate connections whatever you do, there are trees and stories communities have with the wind to land and lodge in pavement cracks, in been living this past year – though soon to leave – landscape that surrounds them. all around that tell us how essential the railway tracks, insignificant banks of dirt in the there is a spectacular complexity of fig (called the THE WOODLAND TRUST is the relationship is between trees, woods and crook of a brick wall, set-square-tidy gardens. Amwell Fig, but really three specimens entangled UK's largest woodland conservation people. So get tree mapping and send us charity, and the leading voice They set up home anywhere, seeming to sprout in each other) reclining decadently across the wall for woods and trees. We inspire the stories you discover! from smooth, unbroken plasterwork, over shop of the Clerkenwell Parochial School, its rich, heavy people to visit woods, plant trees, treasure wildlife and enjoy the doorways on Cally Road. limbs supported by five green-painted props. This overwhelming benefits that woods and trees offer to our landscape I remember this stuff from my childhood ancient citizen I pass most mornings as I walk and lives. The Woodland Trust is garden: the fissured stems like whips; the soft, down the hill lined with pretty early-nineteenth- leading the call for a Charter EVERYBODY HAS A TREE STORY. for Trees, Woods and People. For WHAT'S YOURS? sessile leaves, velvet like a rabbit’s ear; the century terraces. The two-hundred-year-old tree’s more information on the Charter bright spherical clusters, or cymes, of mead- longevity, vigour and abundance (in season, the visit treecharter.uk scented, tangerine-hued flowers, intricate work, pavement underneath those generous branches Views expressed are those of the writers. The Woodland Trust is a registered like a Christingle, like the turmeric bodies of is sweet and humming with dropped fruit), like charity, Nos. 294344 and SC038885. Share your tree story: the bumblebees that pollinate them, like brass the wilfulness of the buddleia and plane, is proof treecharter.uk/share-your-story doorknobs, like little burning suns. In the against the city. 2 | summer 2016 MIDSUMMER DREAMS | LEAF! Luke Best is an illustrator based in London, where he is also a Senior Lecturer at Camberwell College of Arts. WILDWOOD 5000BC Trees, trees and more trees! In a midsummer mood? Illustrator Luke Best responds to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s woodland play filled with magic and transformation. A dynamic patchwork of woodland and areas of grassland in which the grazing of deer and auroch (wild oxen) play an important Fiona Stafford takes us into fact and fantasy, which is why they are at pains to waking’, not at all sure. ‘What do you see?’ asks part. In the fifth millennium BC, Shakespeare’s strangest and most tell their audience that the lion is really Snug the Bottom, the hapless weaver with the hairy ass’s in the late Mesolithic, wildwood Joiner, and their ‘moonshine’ made up of a lantern head, but his companion has already fled in terror. was dominated by lime in magical woodland. and some may flower. During their rehearsals in The threat of everything darkening into Lowland England, by oak and hazel in Wales, western England, the wood, on the other hand, the tree demanded nightmare is never far away, but the dangers are and south Scotland, by elm and by Ovid’s tale of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ is real kept at bay.

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