The Language of Trees (eBook)

How Trees Make Our World, Change Our Minds and Rewild Our Lives

Katie Holten (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
340 Seiten
Elliott & Thompson (Verlag)
978-1-78396-749-0 (ISBN)

Infos

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 BRITISH BOOK DESIGN & PRODUCTION AWARDS* THE IRISH TIMES BESTSELLER and IRISH INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR 'A masterpiece' Max Porter 'A forest of writing to be cherished' Irish Times 'One of the most inspired items of environmental literature in recent years.' Irish Independent If trees have memories, respond to stress, and communicate, what can they tell us? And will we listen? A stunning international collaboration that reveals how trees make our world, change our minds and rewild our lives - from root to branch to seed. In this beautifully illustrated collection, artist Katie Holten gifts readers her visual Tree Alphabet and uses it to masterfully translate and illuminate pieces from some of the world's most exciting writers and artists, activists and ecologists. Holten guides us on a journey from prehistoric cave paintings and creation myths to the death of a 3,500 year-old cypress tree, from Tree Clocks in Mongolia and forest fragments in the Amazon to the language of fossil poetry. In doing so, she unearths a new way of seeing the natural beauty that surrounds us and creates an urgent reminder of what could happen if we allow it to slip away. Printed in deep green ink, The Language of Trees is a celebratory homage filled with prose, poetry and art from over fifty collaborators, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert Macfarlane, Zadie Smith, Radiohead, Elizabeth Kolbert, Amitav Ghosh, Richard Powers, Suzanne Simard, Gaia Vince, Tacita Dean, Plato and Robin Wall Kimmerer. 'Immersive, celebratory... all beautifully illustrated.' Observer 'A visual reminder that, like strong oaks from little acorns, we still can create the world in which we wish to live.' Kerri ní Dochartaigh 'A thoughtful and incisive view of Nature across the globe.' The Countryman

KATIE HOLTEN is an artist and activist, born in Ireland and living in New York City and Ardee, Ireland. In 2003, she represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale. She has had solo exhibitions at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and Dublin City Gallery: The Hugh Lane. Her drawings investigate the entangled relationships between humans and the natural world. She has created Tree Alphabets, a Stone Alphabet, and a Wildflower Alphabet to share the joy she finds in her love of the more-than-human world. Her work has appeared in the Irish Times, New York Times, Artforum, and frieze. She is a visiting lecturer at the New School of the Anthropocene. If she could be a tree, she would be an Oak.

Textauszug

Branches, Leaves, Roots and Trunks

ROBERT MACFARLANE

THE WORD-HOARD

‘Language is fossil poetry,’ wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1844, ‘[a]s the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.’ Emerson, as essayist, sought to reverse this petrification and restore the ‘poetic origin’ of words, thereby revealing the originary role of ‘nature’ in language. Considering the verb to consider, he reminds us that it comes from the Latin considerare, and thus carries a meaning of ‘to study or see with the stars’. Etymology illuminates—a mundane verb is suddenly starlit. Many of the terms in the glossaries of landscape-language that I have collected over the last decade seem, at least to me, as yet unpetrified and still vivid with poetry. They function as topograms—tiny poems that conjure scenes.

There is no single mountain language, but a range of mountain languages; no one coastal language, but a fractal of coastal languages; no lone tree language, but a forest of tree languages. To celebrate the lexis of landscape is not nostalgic, but urgent. ‘People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love,’ writes the American essayist and farmer Wendell Berry, ‘and to defend what we love we need a particularising language, for we love what we particularly know.’

We are and always have been name-callers, christeners. Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes grained into our words. ‘Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind,’ in Wade Davis’s memorable phrase. We see in words: in webs of words, wefts of words, woods of words. The roots of individual words reach out and intermesh, their stems lean and criss-cross, and their outgrowths branch and clasp.

‘I want my writing to bring people not just to think of “trees” as they mostly do now,’ wrote Roger Deakin in a notebook that was discovered after his early death, ‘but of each individual tree, and each kind of tree.’ John Muir, spending his first summer working as a shepherd among the pines of the Sierra Nevada in California, reflected in his journal that ‘Every tree calls for special admiration. I have been making many sketches and regret that I cannot draw every needle.’

I have come to understand that although place-words are being lost, they are also being created. Nature is dynamic, and so is language. Loanwords from Chinese, Urdu, Korean, Portugese and Yiddish are right now being used to describe the landscapes of Britain and Ireland; portmanteaus and neologisms are constantly in manufacture. As I travelled I met new words as well as salvaging old ones: a painter in the Hebrides who used landskein to refer to the braid of blue horizon lines in hill country on a hazy day; a five-year-old girl who concocted honeyfur to describe the soft seeds of grasses held in the fingers.

BRANCHES, LEAVES, ROOTS AND TRUNKS

atchorn

acorn (Herefordshire)

balkcut

tree (Kent)

bannut-tree

walnut tree (Herefordshire)

beilleag

bark of a birch tree (Gaelic)

biests

wen-like protuberances on growing trees (East Anglia)

bole	main part of the trunk of a tree before it separates into branches (forestry)

bolling

permanent trunk left behind after pollarding (pronounced to rhyme with ‘rolling’) (forestry)

brattling

sloppings from felled trees (Northamptonshire)

breakneck, brokeneck

tree whose main stem has been snapped by the wind (forestry)

browse line

level above which large herbivores cannot browse woodland foliage (forestry)

burr	excrescence on base of tree: some broad-leaved trees with a burr, especially walnut, can be very valuable, the burr being prized for its internal patterning (forestry)

butt	lower part of the trunk of a tree (forestry)

cag	stump of a branch protruding from the tree (Herefordshire)

cant-mark

stub pollarded tree used to mark a land boundary (forestry)

celynnoga

bounding in holly (place-name element) (Welsh)

chats

dead sticks (Herefordshire)

chissom

first shoots of a newly cut coppice (Cotswolds)

cramble

boughs or branches of crooked and angular growth, used for craft or firewood (Yorkshire)

crank

dead branch of a tree (Cotswolds)

crìonach

rotten tree; brushwood (Gaelic)

daddock

dead wood (Herefordshire)

damage cycle

narrower rings in the stump of the tree, indicating the accidental loss of branches which are gradually replaced. Useful in helping to work out when and at what intervals a tree has been pollarded/coppiced (forestry)

deadfall

dead branch that falls from a tree as a result of wind or its own weight (forestry)

dodderold

pollard (Bedfordshire)

dosraich

abundance of branches (Gaelic)

dotard

decaying oak or sizeable single tree (Northamptonshire)

eirytall

clean-grown sapling (Cotswolds)

eller

nelder tree (Herefordshire)

flippety

young twig or branch that bends before a hook or clippers (Exmoor)

foxed

term applied to an old oak tree, when the centre becomes red and indicates decay (Northamptonshire)

frail

leaf skeleton (Banffshire)

griggles

small apples left on the tree (south-west England)

interarboration

intermixture of the branches of trees on opposite sides (used by Sir Thomas Browne in The Garden of Cyrus, 1658) (arboreal)

kosh	branch (Anglo-Romani)

lammas

second flush of growth in late summer by some species, e.g. oak (forestry)

leafmeal

tree’s ‘cast self,’ disintegrating as fallen leaves (Gerard Manley Hopkins) (poetic)

lenticels

small pore in bark or a leaf for breathing (forestry)

maiden

tree which is not a coppice stool nor a pollard (forestry)

mute	stumps of trees and bushes left in the ground after felling (Exmoor)

nape	when laying a hedge, to cut the branch partly through so that it can be bent down (East Anglia)

nubbin

stump of a tree after the trunk has been felled (Northamptonshire)

palmate

leaves that have lobes arranged like the fingers of a hand, e.g. horse chestnut (forestry)

pankto

knock or shake down apples from the tree...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.6.2023
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Natur / Technik ► Natur / Ökologie
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Natur / Technik ► Naturführer
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Sport
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Biologie ► Ökologie / Naturschutz
• Schlagworte: Activist • Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Air • A Life on Our Planet • ART • Benedict Macdonald • Ben Wilson • Book of Wilding • braiding sweetgrass • carbon • Climate • climate change • CO2 • conservation • David Attenborough • earth • Ecology • Environment • finding the mother tree • Forest • gathering moss • Gift • global warming • Habitat • halliday • Isabelle Tree • Jungle • katie holten • kimmerer • Kolbert • Landlines • Macfarlane • Morpurgo • My Heart Was a Tree • Naturalist • natural world • Nature • old ways • Orchard • Otherlands • Park • photosynthesis • Planet • Poetry • Preservation • Prose • Raynor Winn • Rewild • RSPB Pocket Guide • Salt Path • Simard • Simon Barnes • sixth extinction • timber • Trees • Underland • urban jungle • Wilderness • Wilderness Cure • Wilding • Wood • woodland • woods • World
• ISBN-10: 1-78396-749-8 / 1783967498
• ISBN-13: 978-1-78396-749-0 / 9781783967490