On the one hand my experimental images – on the other these photograms of plants, with which I make greetings cards. I began with them twenty years before Covid. There was another time when you weren’t allowed to walk outside London – 2001, when there was an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in cattle. Instead of country walks, I followed ‘The Green London Way’, written by Bob Gilbert, gathering plants as I went. The book has been through many editions and changes, but I still have my backpack-battered copy of the original, published by Lawrence & Wishart (1991). Over 110 miles, linking footpaths, commons, parks, canals and woods within London.
Twenty years later, another Bob Gilbert book was a good companion. “Ghost Trees – Nature and People in a London Parish’ (2018). Written well before Covid, but it seemed very apt in 2021. Confined to your own area, what can you do? Pay really close attention to your surroundings; in his case, to almost every tree in Poplar (there aren’t that many), a traffic heavy corner of East London, squeezed between Canary Wharf and the Blackwall Tunnel. See what you can find beneath your feet and above your head. And often what you see (what I pocketed) are the dried out skeletons and husks, with the structure of the plant exposed. To quote Bob Gilbert on a crow’s nest: ‘It is no more than a precarious pile of twigs balanced in a crook of thin branches, but it has some secret engineering of its own, an invisible anchoring that enables it to ride out the storm.’
For more plant images, see my Instagram site @plantshadowcards
