Forest Green

Giuseppe Penone, Albero Folgorato (Thunderstruck Tree) 

The last Giuseppe Penone exhibition I went to was a joint show with Richard Long back in 2011 - see the blog post I wrote then, 'To Repeat the Forest'. Now Penone is showing work at the Serpentine Gallery, with some large tree sculptures in the park outside. The one in my photograph above is reminiscent of the storm-blasted trees Salvator Rosa painted, its gold paint as bright as lightening in the May sunshine. It reminded me of the gold used to repair broken bowls in Japanese kintsugi - if only we treated trees with the care we treat valuable ceramics. 

In his Guardian review Jonathan Jones enjoys describes another tree sculpture. 'A grove of stones, worn smooth in riverbeds, surround two trees. But boulders also balance in their high branches. The Earth and sky are reversed. Are the boulders as real as they look? Is disaster about to descend?' As I stood under them I thought of that amusing scene in the film Official Competition where a filmmaker played by Penélope Cruz gets her actors stressed out by making them perform underneath a suspended rock. Jones starts his review by saying he was lured inside by the aroma of laurel leaves, and references the story of Daphne and Apollo. This myth also features in the new Ian Hamilton Finlay show at Victoria Miro, although Jones' hatchet job on that exhibition doesn't mention it. 

Giueseppe Penone, Verde del bosco (Forest Green), 2008

In addition to being a sculptor, is Penone ever what might be called a landscape artist? Yes, see above. The trees here are indexical signs bearing the imprint of themselves. The curators note that 'Penone wraps natural cotton fibres around the trunks of living trees and creates frottage rubbings using leaves. The distinctive furrows of the bark are transferred and recorded on the fabric, forming the foundation of the rich vegetation in the drawings.'

Penone's use of vegetable colour here brings to mind another recent Guardian article profiling Su Yu-Xin, 'The landscape artist who makes her paint from pearls, crystals and volcanic dust'. Her art almost sounds like a byproduct of the research that goes into sourcing her pigments. I was also reminded of the special ink Robert Macfarlane has been using to sign limited editions of his new book Is a River Alive? This uses water samples collected by participants on last year's March for Clean Water, mixed with water from the Pools of Dee in Scotland. Since 1981 Penone has done a whole series that I think Rob Macfarlane might like, To Be a River. Here are some quotes from Penone's website:

To know every stone, each ravine, each small bed of sand of a stream, to revisit it each year probing its bed to record the changes produced by rains, by frost.

No element, none of its forms are accidental.

Hands turning white from staying in the water to be, at least once, part of the river.

The bends in rivers are closely related to the fullness of the earth, the bends in the path to the emptiness of the air. 

The breath too, breathing expands following a path, sometimes meandering, other times more taut following the air currents. 

Filling a space with the meanderings of the breath, the volume of the breath produced by the life of a man. 

Cornstalks and wildflowers

 Tirzah Garwood, The Photographer, c. 1947

The Dulwich Picture Gallery's current exhibition is a Tirzah Garwood, covering her early woodcuts, marbled papers, box-frame collages and slightly surreal oil paintings like this one, The Photographer. The trees here are represented by leaf prints: 'using a method favoured by Victorian botanists, Garwood covered one side of a leaf with ink and then pressed it onto paper, creating a strange miniature tree.' The subject was inspired by some Edwardian family photographs found by Henry Swanzy, who had become her second husband in 1946 (as a key figure in encouraging post-war Caribbean and African literature he is almost as interesting as her first husband, Eric Ravilious). Sadly they only had a brief time together - her cancer returned in 1948 and she died in 1951. 

Tirzah Garwood, Etna, 1944

Garwood clearly enjoyed playing with scale and creating artificial landscapes - an earlier painting shows toys (that for a moment look real) in a garden, so that the foliage surrounding them seems unnaturally large. It reminded me of oddities I've written about here before, like Carl Wilhelm Kolbe's Kräuterblätter scenes featuring over-sized plant life, or the botanical illustrations of Gherardo Cino that blow up herbs to the size of trees. In Etna she depicts Mount Caburn in Sussex with a toy train and 'cornstalks and wildflowers that seem to dwarf the chickens pecking alongside the railway line.' In the exhibition catalogue James Russell writes that the hill in this painting 'is dependably solid, modelled in a different medium but with a similar feeling for mass to The Westbury Horse, one of her late husband's career-defining pre-war watercolours that she had with her still. Perhaps she referred to it as she worked; perhaps she was even responding to it, but also in her own way transforming the Sussex countryside into a landscape from a dream.'

His shade protects the plains, his head the hills commands

"The Oak," observes Mr. Gilpin, "is confessedly the most picturesque tree in itself, and the most accommodating in composition. It refuses no subject, either in natural, or in artificial landscape. It is suited to the grandest, and may with propriety be introduced into the most pastoral. It adds new dignity to the ruined tower, and Gothic arch; it throws its arms with propriety over the mantling pool, and may be happily introduced even in the lowest scene."

From Sylvan sketches; or, A companion to the parks and the shrobbery: with illustrations from the works of the poets (1825) by Elizabeth Kent

This quote about landscape by William Gilpin, influential eighteenth century writer on the Picturesque, is an excuse to mention two books by Elizabeth Kent. This one, Sylvan Sketches, is a guide to trees and it was her follow-up to Flora domestica, or, The portable flower-garden: with directions for the treatment of plants in pots and illustrations from the works of the poets (1823). I've always loved the idea of plant dictionaries based on quotes from poetry and years ago tried to compile one myself, in a vain attempt to lodge in my brain botanical knowledge that would enliven family walks and impress my wife when we visited garden centres. Sadly it failed, as I was always more interested in the poets than the plants. You would be hard pressed to beat Kent's two books though - they are delightful. And what makes them especially interesting is that she was part of the Cockney School, fully conversant with contemporary poets like Keats, Shelley and John Clare, whose work she quotes extensively. Kent was the sister-in-law of Leigh Hunt and worked very closely with him, leading to some contemporary gossip (see Daisy Hay's Young Romantics).      

Sir Philip Sidney's Oak, Patrick Nasmyth, c. 1820s (V&A) 

There is of course plenty to say about the oak tree, for example

• She refers to the way poets celebrated an oak planted at Penshurst on the day of Sir Philip Sidney's birth. 'That taller tree which of a nut was set, / At his great birth where all the muses met' (Ben Jonson). Kent says that the Sidney oak 'has since been felled, it is said by mistake : would it be impossible to make a similar mistake with regard to the mistaker?' In fact the oak was older than Sidney and was still going strong when Kent was writing her book. Thomas Packenham included it in his enjoyable survey Meetings with Remarkable Trees (1996), but it died twenty years later. Also on the subject of Sidney and trees, see Rebecca Solnit's negative take which I discussed in a post back in 2011. 

• Another thing I once discussed on this blog, was the references to trees, including oaks, in Virgil's Eclogues. Elizabeth Kent quotes his other poems, The Aeneid and The Georgics, in Sylvan sketches. 'Stretching his brawny arms, and leafy hands; / His shade protects the plains, his head the hills commands' (John Dryden's translation).

• She also includes some lovely lines from 'The Floure and the Leafe', then thought to be by Chaucer: 'And to a pleasant grove I gan passe, Long er the bright sunne uprisen was : / In which were okes great, streight as a line, / Under the which the grasse so freshe of hew, / Was newly sprong, and an eight foot or nine / Every tree well fro his fellow grew, / With branches brode, laden with leves new, / That sprongen out agen the sunne-shene, / Some very red, and some a glad light green.

You can read the text of Sylvan Sketches (an 1831 edition) on the Internet Archive).

The Rock of Montmajour with Pine Trees

We recently went to the beautiful Van Gogh exhibition at the National Gallery. I thought it very well done and tastefully presented, focusing on the art (even if the NG website does offer opportunities for an 'ochre afternoon tea' with Sunflower Chocolate Pot, a 'healing plants of Provence' creative workshop and a 5-minute meditation session based on Van Gogh's Wheatfield, with Cypresses). As Rachel Cooke says in her review, 'on the walls you’ll find only titles and dates (to know more, you must look up each painting in a booklet): a minimalism designed to allow one’s thoughts and feelings to flow freely, unimpeded by talk of bloody ears and gunshot wounds.' 

Jonathan Jones enthused about the show and observed that 

In a conventional telling, Van Gogh’s life in Provence was brutally split, as his first ecstatic months ended in self-harm and hospitalisation. Here, the translation to Saint-Rémy is not a tragedy at all. You see how his style got ever more free there. A later room is filled with landscapes he painted around Saint-Rémy that teeter on total abstraction: in The Olive Trees, the earth erupts in waves like the sea, trees dance, and a cartoon cloud is so free from rules it could be by Picasso.

The 1889 drawing of olive trees above that I photographed in the exhibition shows just how abstract and decorative his work was becoming. 

There is a whole room dedicated to one landscape series: drawings made in the vicinity of the ruined 12th-century Montmajour Abbey. The curators note that its 'terrain put the artist strongly in mind of the abandoned garden 'Le Paradou' (a Provençal word for 'Paradise'), which featured in Emile Zola's novel The Sin of Abbé Mouret (1875).' The sketch below is The Rock of Montmajour with Pine Trees (1888) and it 'includes an obscured glimpse of Arles on the far left. In Zola's novel, the Abbé, who has forgotten his vows of chastity due to amnesia, occupies the wild paradise of Le Paradou with his lover, distanced from the realities of everyday life.' After reading this I thought I would make an effort to read the novel and then do some more in depth comments here, but online reviews of it are not encouraging. A film adaptation by Georges Franju doesn't sound that enticing either. If I ever do get round to either of these I may add a postscript to this blog post. 

Ash Dome

Here is a photo I took this morning of the David Nash: 45 Years of Drawing exhibition at London's Annely Juda gallery. This room is dedicated to Ash Dome, the living tree sculpture he planted in 1977. Over the years he has returned to tend the trees and make drawings, using charcoal, raw pigment and earth from the ground they circle. The drawing below shows how the trees were fletched over and grafted. In the catalogue he explains: 

I planted 22 ash saplings in a circle with the intention of forming a dome like space for the 21st century, a 30-year project. In 1981 I grafted on branches to take up the lead growth when the tree was fetched and 1983 I started fetching in an anti-clockwise direction around the circle. Over the years each tree has formed its own individual shape, all spiralling towards the centre. (This is achieved by pruning).

The exhibition has film footage showing Nash as a young man planting the saplings and as an older man seeing how they have evolved. In a 2016 post on this blog I described a BBC documentary about British land artists that included Ash Dome: 'David Nash tells James Fox that clips of him working on it over the years show the sculpture gradually growing while he just gets older (Fox tells us he wasn't even born when Nash planted the saplings in 1977).' Sadly this hasn't happened: Ash Dome was not destined to keep on growing.

In a 2019 interview with Martin Gayford, Nash mentions the arrival of ash dieback disease, although the sculpture was still being referred to as Ash Dome (1977–ongoing). Now it is called Ash Dome (1977-2019). The first drawing above is Ash Dome with ash dieback, the second Ash Dome with oaks. After some deliberation Nash decided to plant a new dome of 22 oak trees surrounding the dying ash trees, this time to be fetched in a clockwise direction. So there is hope here for a new 22nd century dome that will outlast us all. But it is a sad moment in the film (see below) when, earlier this year, Nash returns to his sculpture and picks up one of the original trees which lay broken on the ground. 

The Willows

When I reached the point of sand jutting out among the waves, the spell of the place descended upon me with a positive shock. No mere “scenery” could have produced such an effect. There was something more here, something to alarm.

I gazed across the waste of wild waters; I watched the whispering willows; I heard the ceaseless beating of the tireless wind; and, one and all, each in its own way, stirred in me this sensation of a strange distress. But the willows especially; for ever they went on chattering and talking among themselves, laughing a little, shrilly crying out, sometimes sighing—but what it was they made so much to-do about belonged to the secret life of the great plain they inhabited. And it was utterly alien to the world I knew, or to that of the wild yet kindly elements. They made me think of a host of beings from another plane of life, another evolution altogether, perhaps, all discussing a mystery known only to themselves. I watched them moving busily together, oddly shaking their big bushy heads, twirling their myriad leaves even when there was no wind. They moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the horrible. 

This is from Algernon Blackwood's 'The Willows' (1907), 'foremost of all' his tales according to H. P. Lovecraft. In it, 'the nameless presences on a desolate Danube are horribly felt and recognised by a pair of idle voyagers. Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note.' Blackwood was a great explorer of the outdoors and 'The Willows' was based on his own experiences camping 'on one of the countless lonely islands below Pressburg.' This area on the modern border of Slovakia and Hungary looks like it would be pleasant to visit these days - there is an attractive-looking nature reserve at Dunajské luhy which I am sure is a lot less menacing than Blackwood's 'waste of wild waters'.

Another Blackwood story that deals directly with landscape is 'The Face of the Earth', in which a German professor obsessed with the idea that the Earth is a living Being discerns the semblance of a face in the Dorsetshire Hills. He tries to entice a young student to sacrifice himself in a mouth-like chalk pit ("Come quick. It is the feeding-time.") This and 'The Willows' can be found in a new OUP anthology of Blackwood stories The Wendigo and Other Stories. Editor Aaron Worth points to Blackwood's continuing relevance in 'his pioneering exploration of such topics as plant consciousness and agency, ecological catastrophe ... and monstrous entanglements within natural systems.' A story beginning to attract renewed critical attention for its relevance to colonialism and environmentalism is 'The Man Whom the Trees Loved' (1912). This is set on the edge of the New Forest and concerns a former employee of the Imperial Forest Service in India whose love for the forest outside his English home takes over his life and estranges him from his wife. The way these trees form a single communicating entity anticipates recent debates about the wood wide web.  

'The Man Whom the Trees Loved' may be interesting material for ecocritics but as a story it is, I'm afraid to say, pretty tedious and long-winded. 'The Willows', by contrast, is perfectly paced and compelling. Initially the two canoeists feel menaced by the landscape, but what begins with disquiet at the way the trees move becomes something much bigger, the kind of cosmic horror Lovecraft would specialise in. 

The eeriness of this lonely island, set among a million willows, swept by a hurricane, and surrounded by hurrying deep waters, touched us both, I fancy. Untrodden by man, almost unknown to man, it lay there beneath the moon, remote from human influence, on the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows. 

Radical Landscapes

Back in 2022 Tate Liverpool held an exhibition of 'Radical Landscapes'. I didn't make the effort to go because it sounded like I would be familiar with a lot of the work as well as the underlying theme. I have written here before about exhibitions questioning 'traditional' ideas of landscape and land use in Britain - see for example my post in 2012 on Patrick Keiller's Tate Britain installation The Robinson Institute. I was also rather put off by Jonathan Jones's review (even though my views often diverge from his). He took the curators to task for their naive view of Constable and illogical politics. By defining Constable’s 'love of the British countryside as something retrograde, oppressive and literally Tory, it makes nonsense of its own thesis that the land belongs to us all, as well as its warnings of the urgency of climate crisis. If loving green fields is wicked, why go there? If nature is exclusive, why save it?' Laura Cumming also noted that 'Constable gets the usual pasting for showing a rural England where the poor are free to farm and roam the land as if the Enclosure Acts had never happened,' but was overall much more positive. Anyway, I didn't get to go, so I can't really comment on all this.

The reason I mention this exhibition now is that a cut down version of it has been on display in Walthamstow's William Morris Gallery. This is just a short tube journey away for me, so I popped along last week. It was certainly full of familiar work - Derek Jarman's garden, Peter Kennard's Constable missiles, Homer Sykes' Burry Man - and went through some predictable radical history landmarks: Kinder Scout, Greenham Common, Newbury. I've seen footage of the Spiral Tribe in various music documentaries and exhibitions and it never makes those nineties outdoor raves look remotely appealing! The Neo-Naturists were on show again here - they are unavoidable at the moment, getting naked at the Barbican in RE/SISTERS and (apparently - I haven't been yet) in Tate Britain's 'Women in Revolt!' But I was expecting to see a lot of this and in such a small show there were also inevitably obvious omissions - no Ingrid Pollard or Fay Godwin for example, both of whom are in RE/SISTERS.

 

Anwar Jalal Shemza, Apple Tree, 1962

If you want to read about this Walthamstow exhibition, there is a comprehensive review of it in Studio International by someone a bit less jaded than me! I suspect I might have found more eye-opening art among works from the original Liverpool exhibition that had to be left out here. But it was definitely worth a trip (and free!) and I will end here by mentioning a Klee-like painting by Anwar Jalal Shemza that I particularly liked. I don't recall seeing this one before. Shemza was born in India and published Urdu novels in the fifties before permanently relocating to Stafford, his wife Mary's hometown, in 1962. The Hales Gallery website notes that 'throughout his career, Shemza’s visual vocabulary drew on an array of deeply studied and lived experience, from carpet patterns and calligraphic forms to the environments around him: Mughal architecture from Lahore and the rural landscapes of Stafford, England.' 

Taming the Garden

MUBI was a godsend during Covid lockdowns and is still proving good value for money as far as we're concerned. This week I watched Taming the Garden by Salomé Jashi, a documentary with extraordinary images of moving trees. 'Georgia’s former prime minister [Bidzina Ivanishvili] has found a unique hobby. He collects century-old trees, some as tall as 15-floor buildings, from communities along the Georgian coast. At a great expense and inconvenience, these ancient giants are uprooted from their lands to be transplanted in his private garden.' Peter Bradshaw's review in The Guardian mentions some of the obvious references that spring to mind as you watch it (Macbeth, Fitzcarraldo) and describes Jashi's unobtrusively filmed footage of people involved in moving the trees:

Local workers squabble among themselves at the dangerous, strenuous, but nonetheless lucrative job of digging them up. The landowners and communities brood on the sizeable sums of money they are getting paid and Ivanishvili’s promises that roads will also be built. But at the moment of truth, they are desolate when the Faustian bargain must be settled and the huge, ugly haulage trucks come to take their trees away in giant “pots” of earth, as if part of their natural soul is being confiscated.

I am reminded of a previous blog post I wrote on the creation of Song Emperor Hui-tsung's garden, where plants and rocks were shipped in from all over China, and its later fictionalisation in Ming dynasty novel The Plum in the Golden Vase, which tells the story of a licentious and corrupt character called Hsi-men Ch’ing. 

Resentment has built up during its construction, as the process of shipping 'so many huge rocks and plants had cluttered up the canals and transport system. There had also been endless corruption and compulsion during the entire high-speed plan'. Unsurprisingly Hsi-men Ch’ing got involved in this. At one point in the novel he discusses with an official the way the 'flower and rock convoys' had impoverished ordinary people, before inviting him to partake of a typically lavish lunch. 

Salomé Jashi's slow, beautifully-shot documentary has no Herzogian narrator or any explanation of what is happening - the actual scale of the exercise, its costs, its purpose, its outcomes. Another Guardian piece by Claire Armistead makes the point that 'Taming the Garden is far from a balanced two-minute news report; it stands at the junction of documentary and myth, not even mentioning that Ivanishvili’s garden is now open to the public.' A New York Times article by Ivan Nechepurenko notes that the Shekvetili Dendrological Park opened in 2020, 'but signs declaring this property private are everywhere. CCTV cameras are installed throughout, and motion detectors stand in front of every tree. Look, but don’t dare touch. And that message goes for the lawn, too. Guards with loudspeakers are quick to scold the noncompliant.' He describes Ivanishvili's political background and links to Russia, where he acquired his vast wealth from metals and banking. He also includes reflections from an academic researching the interconnectedness of trees and their supporting fungal networks, who says she felt physical pain when she heard about the project.

The trailer for Taming the Garden embedded above includes some of Jashi's poetic compositions, including lovely details like drifting steam and water running over metal. As Claire Armistead writes, 'although many trees were involved in the filming, their stories are represented by one symbolic journey.' She goes on to pick out a few details:

Villagers gather with their bicycles to see the tree on its way. A man lights his first cigarette in 30 years. An elderly woman weeps and convulsively crosses herself, while her younger relatives excitedly record the removal on their phones. As the tree is sailed along the coast – in a repeat of the image that inspired the film – two bulldozers await it on a stone mole, their excavator arms lowered like bowed heads at a funeral. And in a rich man’s manicured garden, round the half-buried roots of ancient trees held upright by guy ropes, the sprinklers come on.

Sea and Sand Dunes

Here's what you see when you enter the Royal Academy's new exhibition, a view of a bay with oddly sketchy waves, scattered black buildings and stick trees like Chinese characters. In Jonathan Jones' Guardian review he says

'Avery is sometimes hyped as an American Matisse but he is much stranger, and better, than that. Far from simply emulating Matisse, he translates the pleasures of beach life and summer days the French fauve painted into the brooding land and seascapes of America with wild results. Little Fox River, from 1942, seems joyous and summery at first sight, with its butter-yellow landscape surrounded by blue waves, but then you notice how big and inhuman the waves are, how tiny the swell of the sea makes the frail houses and church look.'

 Milton Avery, Little Fox River, 1942

The first room of the exhibition begins with some of Avery's early, unremarkable Impressionist-style landscapes and a range of later ones which can seem wilfully ugly in their choice of thin paint, dull colours and awkwardly drawn animals and buildings. But he could also hit on a combination of forms that seems wonderfully original and appealing, like Blue Trees (below - available to buy as a jigsaw in the RA shop!) My favourite works in the exhibition weren't the landscapes or his snapshots of city life, but domestic scenes which he painted in increasingly simplified forms, like Reclining Blonde (1959). Here's Laura Cumming describing his technique in another five-star review:

'Avery thinned his oil paint to the diaphanous consistency of watercolour so that it lay on the surface in floating patches and veils. Sometimes he scribbled upon it – the outline of a pencil or a pipe, a fleet of horizontal nicks that somehow manifest as leaves on a rust-coloured autumn tree. Sometimes the brushstrokes of one colour merge into those of another to produce a soft frisson, as in the snow-white nude against a black background, where the overlap glimmers.'

Milton Avery, Blue Trees, 1945

I first came across Avery years ago when I was reading a lot about his friend Mark Rothko, but I've never seen an exhibition devoted to his work - unsurprising as there hasn't been one in Europe. This one was a real pleasure and, despite the glowing reviews, not too busy with other visitors. It ends with paintings from 1957 inspired by Cape Cod, where, as the curators explain, 'Avery spent four consecutive summers, often in the company of Rothko and Gottlieb. These later works, with their larger scale and more abstracted forms, reveal the influence of the younger painters. Intensifying what he had striven towards over the previous five decades, Avery omitted detail, distorted forms and used non-associative colours.' These non-associative colours are evident in the painting I photographed below, Sea and Sand Dunes, a truly weird landscape in shades of red, white and mauve. A painting like this actually looks more contemporary than the abstract expressionists, reminding me of Alex Katz or Peter Doig. Jonathan Jones concludes that after visiting this exhibition 'you’ll never be able to see a Rothko again without picturing a seashore at dusk where the red blazing sky is layered above the wine dark sea, in an apocalyptic revelation.'

Milton Avery, Sea and Sand Dunes, 1955

The waves were like agate

 

Eugène Delacroix, Sunset, c. 1850

I have been reading the Journals of Eugène Delacroix in a lovely, pristine Folio edition I found in a secondhand bookshop in York (the selections were originally translated by Lucy Norton for Phaidon in 1951). Most of what Delacroix writes about concerns art - how to achieve the effects he wants and admires in great artists of the past like Rubens and Titian. Landscape art as such was not a particular concern for him, although he was always looking at the way other artists painted skies, trees and waves. The appeal of the journals is the way they mix his ideas on aesthetics with everyday concerns - health, relationships, conversations, travel. I thought here I would just extract a few moments where he writes about walks in nature and describes views with the eye of a great painter. In 1849 he was fifty-one and dividing his time between Paris and Champrosay, now in the city's southern suburbs, with holidays on the Normandy coast near Dieppe.

Champrosay, 24 June 1849

In the morning it had been thundery and oppressive, but by the afternoon the quality of the heat had changed and the setting sun lent everything a gaiety which I never used to see in the evening light. I find that, as I grow older, I am becoming less susceptible to those feelings of deepest melancholy that used to come over me when I looked at nature, and I congratulated myself on this as I walked along.

Valmont, 9 October 1849

We went down to the sea by a little path on the right which was unfamiliar to me. There was the loveliest greensward imaginable, sloping gently downwards, from the top of which we had a view of the vast expanse of sea. I am always deeply stirred by the great line of the sea, all blue or green or rose-coloured - that indefinable colour of a vast ocean. The intermittent sound reaches from far away and this, with the smell of the ozone, is actually intoxicating.

Cany, 10 October 1849

Magnificent view as we climbed the hill out of Cany; tones of cobalt in the green masses of the background in contrast to the vivid green and occasional gold tones in the foreground.

Champosay, 27 October 1853

Went for a stroll in the garden and then stood for a long time under the poplars at Baÿvet; they delight me beyond words, especially the white poplars when they are beginning to turn yellow. I lay down on the ground to see them silhouetted against the blue sky with their leaves blowing off in the wind and falling off about me.

Paris, 5 August 1854

A lump of coal or a piece of flint may show in reduced proportions the form of enormous rocks. I noticed the same thing when I was in Dieppe. Among the rocks that are covered by the sea at high tide I could see bays and inlets, beetling crags overhanging deep gorges, winding valleys, in fact all the natural features which we find in the world around us. It is the same with waves which are themselves divided into smaller waves and then subdivided into ripples, each showing the same accidents of light and the same design.

Dieppe, 25 August 1854

During my walk this morning I spent a long time studying the sea. The sun was behind me and thus the face of the waves as they lifted towards me was yellow; the side turned towards the horizon reflected the colour of the sky. Cloud shadows passing over all this made delightful effects; in the distance where the sea was blue and green, the shadows appeared purple, and a golden and purple tone extended over the nearer part as well, where the shadow covered it. The waves were like agate. 

Dieppe, 17 September 1854

A rather miserable dinner. However, when I went down to the beach, I was compensated by seeing the setting sun amidst banks of ominous-looking red and gold clouds. These were reflected in the sea, which was dark wherever it did not catch the reflection. I stood motionless for more than half an hour on the very edge of the waves, never growing tired of their fury, of the foam and the backwash and the crash of the rolling pebbles.

7000 Oaks

Joseph Beuys, 7000 Eichen
Photograph taken in 2003, from Wikimedia Commons 

Following on from my last post I thought I would briefly mention another famous European environmental art intervention from the eighties, Joseph Beuys' 7000 Oaks (1982-87). Here's a description by the Dia Foundation, who partly sponsored it:

Joseph Beuys’s project 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks) began in 1982 at Documenta 7, the large international art exhibition in Kassel, Germany. His plan called for the planting of 7,000 trees—each paired with a columnar basalt stone approximately four feet high and positioned above ground—throughout the greater city of Kassel. With major support from Dia Art Foundation, the project was carried forward under the auspices of the Free International University and took five years to complete; the last tree was planted at the opening of Documenta 8 in 1987. Beuys intended for the Kassel project to be the first stage in an ongoing scheme of tree planting that would extend throughout the world as part of a global mission to spark environmental and social change. Locally, the action was a gesture toward urban renewal.

I have never been to Kassel but it must be fascinating to wander round and see how these trees are getting on. How many of the originals are still there? It is easy to imagine that the basalt columns are no more resistant to developers and planning decisions than the living trees. There were large protests near me recently at the felling of the Happy Man Tree, a much-loved 150-year old London plane tree. It made me think back to one of the first posts I wrote for this blog, on Charlotte Mew's poems about the 'murder' of the great planes opposite her home. 

I came across an interesting essay on a blog by Andrew Bruce that gives some information on how the Joseph Beuys trees have fared. He draws on an article by Stephan Körner and Florian Bellin-Harder, 'The 7000 Eichen of Joseph Beuys – Experiences After Twenty-Five Years' (2009). Perhaps unsurprisingly, many trees had not been well cared for. They estimated that '70 replacement trees are required annually – these replacements are not true Beuys trees, the basalt column is removed upon the death of an original.' However,

There are exceptions to the poor state of the trees as reported by Körner and Bellin-Harder. Volunteer groups have carefully maintained several groups of trees. Other trees have become beloved foci of community activity. The study gives an example of a Beuys tree planted at an intersection that was closed to traffic at the behest of a citizens group just prior to Beuys’ action. The linden in this Plätzchen (little square) has been the site of ‘street festivals, baptisms, and other parties such as children’s birthdays’, children also meet there to walk to school together and play there after school. The lives of trees like this one come closer to the social relevance Beuys intended...

die wiese

herman de vries in the Steigerwald
(source: Vince de Vries, Wikimedia Commons)

The meadow planted near Eschenau in Upper Franconia by herman de vries, die wiese - one of the best known works of European land art - is no longer being maintained. According to a comment on the artist's website, 'in 2019 herman de vries decided not to intervene anymore and now the meadow will become part of the Steigerwald.' It is not surprising, because the artist is now eighty-nine, although I sometimes think artists who work out in nature must be a lot fitter than the average. There was a short interview with him in The Independent five years ago that said he was scaling back his work. 'The artist walks in the nearby forest every day, although health problems in the last year have slowed him down. He keeps a map charting his walks on the wall of his kitchen, which becomes an art work at the end of the year. He finds fallen trees: "They are nice sculptures, no? A sculpture that nature makes."'

I have been looking back at the Michael Fehr essay 'Herman's Meadow' (1992), which was reproduced in the Kastner/Wallis book Land and Environental Art (Phaidon, 1998). It was written six years after de vries and his wife Susanne began the project. I was struck by the lists of species in Fehr's descriptions of the meadow's development. Here is a quote from the essay with the lists turned into columns:

As a border, they planted a hedge composed of a variety of shrubs:

hazel
hawthorn
blackthorn
dogrose
euonymus
viburnum
rowanberry
privet

as well as a row of cultivated and semi-cultivated trees:

hazelnut
rowan
cornelian cherry
medlar

and older varieties of

apple
pear
plum

- and let it take its natural course. Late in the year, after seeding, half of the area was cut and the cuttings removed, so that the fodder meadow - overfertilised up till then with artificial fertilisers and liquid manure three times yearly - would lose some of its richness. In the following year, herman and Susanne collected seeds along embankments, paths and the edge of the forest from plants that had been resistant to the farmers' machines and liquid manure sprays and planted them in their meadow: in molehills and earth which had bcen dug up by wild boars. Consequently,

columbine
naked lady
alchemilla
scabious
pincushion flower
agrimony
angelica
avens
meadow salvia
primrose
valerian
mugwort
leonorus
yellow iris
comfrey
carnations
hops
byrony
rhinanthus and
belladonna

had a chance to spread. These were joined spontaneously by

spiraea
saxifrage
red clover
wood anemone
blue cranesbill

and runners from the aspen at the end of the forest developed shoots in the upper part of the meadow.

Goethe's oak

 

 Paintings in the Goethe House, Frankfurt

I was on something of a Goethe pilgrimage last weekend, with five stops, beginning in his childhood home in Frankfurt.  This was where he began Faust and wrote Werther before moving to Weimar at the age of twenty-six.  The house itself was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid but has been reconstructed; the contents were all kept safe during the war.  What you see when you look round is essentially the home Goethe's father created, including his pictures - some of them landscapes - all framed in black and gold.  I particularly liked two circular landscape views in the music room either side of a pyramid piano. There is no readily accessible information on who painted these, which is a pity because I would love to know more.  The website refers to paintings 'in the Dutch tradition (Trautmann, Schütz the Elder, Juncker, Hirt, Nothnagel, Morgenstern), and by the Darmstadt court painter Seekatz'.  Schütz the Elder was a landscape specialist, so perhaps they are by him.

The music room in the Goethe House, Frankfurt

From Frankfurt I travelled to Weimar and the Park an der Ilm, landscaped from 1778 under the influence of Goethe.  It was based on the Wörlitzer park, Germany's first English-style landscape garden, which also inspired the setting for Goethe's novel Elective Affinities (which I will write about in my next post).  In the park you can look round Goethe's Garden House, his first Weimar residence, bought for him in 1776 by Duke Carl August.  Here he could write while listening to the water running over a weir in the river.  Among Goethe's landscape sketches on the wall are three he called 'My Moonlights'.  "Gazing at the moon from his cottage," the audioguide says, "Goethe was frequently inspired to bathe in the Ilm River by moonlight."  One of Goethe's best known poems is 'An der Mond' ('To the Moon'), a poem he sent in a letter to Charlotte von Stein in March 1778.

Goethe's Garden House, Weimar

Goethe returned to this garden house near the end of his life to work on the Italian Journey (this account of his travels in 1786 has always been one of my favourite books, in the classic translation by W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer).  To help remember the topography of Rome he had two large panoramas of the city put up in the dining room.  The print I photographed below is Giuseppe Vasi’s view of modern Rome as seen from the Janiculum Hill (1765).  Turn round and on the opposite wall you see Pirro Ligorio’s bird’s-eye view of ancient Rome, originally published in 1561.

 A panorama of Rome inside the Garden House

From the Garden House I moved on to the main Goethe House and Museum in Weimar, where you start to get an idea of the extraordinary range and depth of his collections.  There are, for example, cases he had specially made for Majolica, which he wrote about in an 1804 essay.  But the true breadth of Goethe's interests was really underlined at my fourth stop, the Schiller House, which was hosting a superb exhibition called 'Adventure of Reason: Goethe and the Sciences around 1800'.  Here there was evidence of his interest in many branches of knowledge that relate indirectly to landscape, from botany (the 'urplant'), fossils and vulcanism to light and colour theory.  He was clearly a key node in the era's overlapping intellectual networks and among his many correspondents, as I've mentioned here before, was the landscape painter Carl Gustav Carus.  Goethe owned this painting by Carus, which reminded me of the chalk cliffs I wrote about in Frozen Air.

 Carl Gustav Carus, Chalk cliffs at Cape Arkana on Rügen, after 1819

The drawing below by Goethe below looks at first sight like a view of cliffs, but is actually a Hypothetical Depiction of a Mountain. It is a good example of his interest in morphology and archetypal structures.  Goethe had a professional interest in geology through his involvement in mining, but it was evidently an absolute passion for him.  His geological collection eventually numbered 18,000 items.  I loved this quote about his collection of tin specimens:

'For many years, especially after 1813, Goethe was occupied by stannous (tin) rock formations.  He collected them in Bohemia and Saxony and had them sent to him from all over Europe.  He called it his "tin pleasure".  He considered tin to be the primeval metal, as it marked the end of the granite age.  Despite years of study, he only published one short article on the subject of tin.'

Goethe's Hypothetical Depiction of a Mountain (probably 1824)

Goethe died in 1832.  Just a century later the Nazis were on the verge of power and five years on they were constructing a concentration camp on the beautiful wooded hill overlooking Weimar. The camp was originally going to be called Ettensburg, but because this place name had such strong associations with Goethe and enlightenment, it was decided to use the name Buchenwald, 'Beech Wood'.  Trees were cleared for the building of the camp, but one oak tree was left standing.  The inmates began to call it Goethe's oak, a living symbol of a better Germany.  The tree was damaged by bombing in 1944 and then felled, but its base has been preserved as part of the Buchenwald memorial.  You can see it in my photograph below under last weekend's grey winter sky.  The dark shape among the trees behind it is the tower of the crematorium.
  

Buchenwald

The wind that waves the pines

The Overstory (2018) is the novel about trees that was up for the Booker last year and has now won the Pulitzer Prize.  Clearly it is a very highly regarded novel but I have to admit I found it a slog to get through.  There is a lot of explanation of what we now know about trees and the Wood Wide Web which is very reminiscent of Peter Wohlleben, indeed one of the characters in the novel writes a book that sounds just like The Hidden Life of Trees (Powers has said this particular character is inspired by Suzanne Simard and Diana Beresford-Kroeger).  As for the story itself - I agree with Benjamin Markovits that 'the ordinary diversity that tends to shape plot on a human scale doesn’t get much of a look-in'.  There is an article by Sam Jordison that does a good job of describing the reasons why the novel didn't work for me ('if The Overstory really is one of the best books of the year, then the novel is dying even faster than the forests.')  However, you may well disagree - Powers clearly has lots of admirers - and my purpose on this blog is not really to give positive or negative reviews. 

I am mentioning The Overstory here because it deals in a sustained way with trees and forests, although I wouldn't say it has any particularly memorable descriptions of landscape.  I am therefore going to veer off and talk about a poem by Wang Wei that plays an important part in the book. One of the main characters learns that her father, a Chinese immigrant, has committed suicide.  He

'puts a Smith & Wesson 686 with hardwood grips up to his temple and spreads the workings of his infinite being across the flagstones of the backyard. He leaves no note except a calligraphic copy of Wang Wei’s twelve-hundred-year-old poem left unfurled on parchment across the desk in his study:

An old man,
I want only peace.
The things of this world
mean nothing.
I know no good way
to live and I can’t
stop getting lost in my
thoughts, my ancient forests.
The wind that waves the pines
loosens my belt.
The mountain moon lights me
as I play my lute.
You ask: how does a man rise or fall in this life?
The fisherman’s song flows deep under the river.'                                                                 (p51)

This poem, 'Answering Magistrate Zhang', can be found translated in many anthologies.  Most of them note that the last line is an allusion to an ancient poem 'Yu fu' ('The Fisherman'), one of The Songs of the South. 'The Fisherman' concerns the banishment of poet Qu Yuan (4th century BCE), which I wrote about here last year. Wandering by a river bank, he encounters a fisherman who tells him that it is wise not to be chained to material circumstances, but move as the world moves.  Qu Yuan wishes to hold himself aloof and pure rather than submit 'to the dirt of others'.  But the fisherman advises him to adapt to the times.  He paddles off, singing as he goes that when the river's waters are clear he can wash his hat-strings in them, and when they are muddy he can wash his feet.  The same song also appears in the Mencius, where the philosopher asks how to deal with a man who is inhumane, and who delights in the things that could lead to his destruction.  It can certainly feel sometimes as if we are dealing with such people in these times, and living in a world where mud is clouding the river waters...

Qu Yuan and the Fisherman

From 'Scenes from the Chu Ci poem Yu Fu' by Bai Yunli 

source: Silkqin.com

A view of the gardens of the Palais du Luxembourg

Jacques-Louis David, View of the Gardens of the Palais du Luxembourg, 1794 

'After walking through a play area, as usual not very pretty – poorly designed swings and toboggans, painted in glaring colours, since it is an established fact that children have no taste – I enter a piece of woodland that seems almost wild, as the gardeners have taken care to let it grow with the least constraint possible. Then, between the edge of this forest and the side of the square, marked by the walls of the Mobilier National, in the centre of the open space we find a 'creation' – in the sense that Encelade's copse at Versailles is a creation. There is a topiary quincunx of box bushes, with roses in the middle: four open semi-cylindrical arbours frame a small obelisk of raw stone. The roses climb over the arbours and embrace the obelisk. To give an idea of the charm of the place, you have to recall one of those painters who were not landscape artists but painted almost by chance a single landscape – I have in mind the Villa Medici Gardens by Velázquez, or David‘s view of the Luxembourg, painted from the cell where he awaited the guillotine after Thermidor.'

-  Eric Hazan, describing the Square René-Le Gall in A Walk Through Paris, translated by David Fernbach, 2018

Diego Velázquez, View of the Garden of the Villa Medici, c. 1630

Reading this passage I thought it was an interesting way of describing the charm of an urban park, encountered as unexpectedly as these modest landscape views among the works of artists known for their figure painting.  I wrote here last year about the Velázquez, but what of David's painting? There was actually a good article devoted to it in The Independent a few years ago, by Michael Glover. In the course of it h, discusses details like that group of figures engaged in some sort of activity.  

'Are these people raking the earth itself? Are they mark-making? Are they engaged in an inscrutable game of some kind? What we do know for certain is that after the Revolution, parts of the Luxembourg Gardens were handed over to be tilled by the common people – in the new spirit of egalitarianism, no doubt. There is not much to be tilled here though, not at this time of year, not much evidence at all of Keats's season of mellow fruitfulness.'  

Why was David confined to this cell?  I have written a post here before about the artificial landscape he designed for the first Celebration of the Supreme Being in June 1794.  This marked the zenith of Robespierre's power - already people were turning against him and within a month he had been guillotined.  David, apparently ill, managed to avoid the same fate but was eventually arrested and spent August to December 1794 in prison. Michael Glover reads the politics of revolution into the landscape David painted there.

'Two factors seem to be at odds with each other in this painting: order and disorder. That fence looks makeshift in the extreme – shockingly makeshift for such an august location. And yet the layout of the gardens themselves, that perfect alignment of trees, for example, somewhat reminds us of how the Luxembourg Gardens are these days, a project that depends for its grandeur and its power to impress upon the taming and ordering of nature in the interests of human reason. And so it is here. But the tops of the trees tell quite a rather story. In these gardens, we are used to the sight of severely pollarded trees. Nature is to be tamed and regulated. Here things have got out of hand. The unruly crowns of the trees are rejoicing in their untamed spirit.'

He concludes by imagining David, in his high prison cell looking down on this view.  'Meditating upon partially untamed nature in this way may have helped his spirit to breathe.'

The field has eyes and the wood has ears

Hieronymus Bosch, The Tree-Man, c. 1505

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Joseph Leo Koerner's magisterial Bosch & Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (2016) is so rich in interest it could furnish material for many blog posts.  Of the two artists, it was of course Breugel who was most influential on landscape painting.  I will do a post on Bruegel, but here I thought I would focus on Hieronymus Bosch.  The Tree-Man features in the right hand panel of his great triptych The Garden of Delights (c. 1490-1510), one of the monsters of Hell.  But he is also the subject of Bosch's largest surviving drawing (above), transplanted to a scene of marshes like those that surrounded his native town, 's-Hertogenbosch.  Beyond the marshes, as Koerner observes, there are 'harbor towns on a maze of waterways, like the huge delta where the Rhine, Meuse, and Scheldt rivers meet; and beyond the visible horizon, at a distance plotted by church spires and vast like the sky, the sea.  There the Tree-Man idly floats like some outlandish carrack adridt in an inland canal.' 

Some contemporaries of Bosch would have witnessed strange phenomena.  Koerner reproduces a sketch of a beached sperm whale drawn by Hendrick Goltzius in 1598 and recalls the story of Dürer trying to sketch another whale on his trip to Zeeland in 1520, only to arrive after the tide had carried it back out to sea. 'Netherlandish shores were natural theaters where wonders could be observed.'  Moreover, the Tree-Man 'travels in a real world along waters that, connecting near and far, explain how the monstrosity might have got there.'  The fact that this realistic landscape surrounds Bosch's fantastical figure makes the image seem 'to encompass the world complete in itself.'  It was only around 1500 that artist's own drawings became collectable and this strange image may actually be the first autonomous pen-and-ink sketch in northern art.

Hieronymus Bosch, The Field Has Eyes, The Forest Has Ears, c. 1500

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Before leaving Bosch it is worth mentioning another remarkable sketch, which at first sight simply depicts a tree in a landscape.  Here (and note the characteristically witty turn of phrase which makes Koerner's books such a pleasure), the 'dead tree serves as a shadowy refuge for an owl, which eyes us with dubious intent.'  Owls appear at least twenty-five times in Bosch's art and can almost be seen as a kind of signature.  In Dutch they were sometimes called boschvoghele.  Above the owl there are shrieking birds and below, at the base of the tree, a rooster pushing its way towards a fox, apparently resting.  But this is a Bosch drawing and so there are also two large ears standing in the thicket and eyes scattered over the ground.  The slope of the field reminds Koerner of the 'subtle curvature of the surface of the earth, ensuring that whatever the work's statement is, it will be global.'  And what does it mean?  'Historians have managed to reattach these stray sensoria to a proverb current in Bosch's day and published and illustrated in a woodcut dated 1546, "The field has eyes and the wood has ears; I will look, stay silent, and listen."'  In other words, in hostile times, it is wise to keep one's counsel.

Boisgeloup in the Rain

Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy is a wonderful exhibition, well worth the five stars Laura Cumming gave it in The Guardian.  There are many highlights but I suspect few critics will draw anyone's attention to the presence of five modestly-sized landscapes, painted at Boisgeloup where the artist was staying in the spring of 1932.  I was looking at these earlier today, having walked through relentless rain to reach Tate Modern.  The weather was apt - as John Richardson points out in his biography of Picasso, 'Easter was very wet that year; most of these views are striated with driving rain - an effect that van Gogh had borrowed from Hiroshige - otherwise they are surprisingly prosaic.'  This is certainly true in comparison to the marvellous sequence of Marie-Thérèse paintings Picasso was working on at the time.  As Laura Cumming writes, their 'atmosphere runs from midnight to bright day, across the seasons and centuries from some ancient grove to modern-day Paris. She dreams; he conjures the myths.'  Boisgeloup in the Rain can't really compete with this.

Pablo Picasso, Landscape with Dead and Live Trees, 1919

Source: Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain because image published in 1921)

In 1932 Picasso's creativity was so all-embracing that it seems to have encompassed every genre of art, including landscape.  But I'm not surprised to find, looking back, that this is the first time I have featured him on this blog.  Picasso's attitude to landscape is captured by John Richardson in connection with another of his occasional paintings of the view outside (see above).  This was painted in 1919, shortly after Picasso had completed work on sets for Tricorne for the Ballets Russes.  

'Designing for the ballet had left a theatrical stamp on his perception of nature.  To the right, farm buildings constitute "wings" (as in Tricorne); to the left, two trees cry out to be scaled up, hung on gauze, and used as a repoussoir to imply recession without recourse to perspective.'

Richardson quotes Picasso's dealer Paul Rosenberg, writing to the artist with 'the most inconceivable news' that he had actually managed to sell this painting, 'the one you thought unsaleable, le paysage rousseauiste.'  

'Rosenberg's hyperbole was presumedly supposed to encourage his artist to do more landscapes, because they would appeal to collectors weaned on impressionism.  Rosenberg failed to realize that Picasso was not a paysagiste at heart.  Nature fascinated him, but only insofar as he could bring it within reach and have his metamorphic way with it.'

High Water Everywhere

When it rains five days and the skies turn dark as night...

I woke up early this mornin', a water hole in my back yard...

Backwater rising, come in my windows and door... 

If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break...

I think I heard a moan, on the Arkansas side...

Nothing but muddy water, as far as I could see...

Lord the whole round country, man, is overflowed...

These are lines from songs by Bessie Smith, Barbecue Bob, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lonnie Johnson, Charlie Patton, Memphis Minnie & Kansas Joe McCoy.  They all touch in different ways on the floods of the late twenties, particularly the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.  You can hear clips on the New York Public Radio's list, Great Songs About the Great Flood.  I learnt from the accompanying article that filmmaker Bill Morrison and guitarist-composer Bill Frisell have collaborated recently on a documentary called The Great Flood.  'Morrison’s films are usually inventive, phantasmagorical affairs, built on decaying silent film stock; here he bases his work on archival documentary footage from 1927, and Frisell provides a score that’s full of his eclectic take on Americana, jazz, and contemporary music. The result is a meditation on the American landscape, on loss, and on consequences -- whether intended or not.'  Sadly such floods seem likely to become increasingly common as global warming affects the weather systems that batter the Southern states.

I've been thinking about the blues and landscape this week, after reading Hari Kunzru's new novel, White Tears, which is partly set in Mississippi.  The way his protagonists are lured into the music's mythic history took me back to my own early enthusiasm for it, when finding information about the early musicians or hearing the records was still not straightforward.  As a sixth former I would take a bus to Sussex University library (you could just walk in if you looked like you were meant to be there) and spend time reading publications in the wonderful Jazz Book Club series.  Paul Oliver was the most prominent British writer on the blues and he seemed to have a fantastic life as an architect with a sideline in musical research.  Just now I dug out an anthology of his writings published in 1984, Blues off the Record, and it's noticeable how many of them describe the landscape that gave rise to the music in some detail, as if the blues was an aspect of geography.  His writing is not especially poetic, but any of those southern place names had an exotic poetry.  'As you descend from the hilly, wooded landscape of De Soto, Tate and Panola Counties in Mississippi to the flat bottomlands of the Mississippi River flood-plain, the landscape changes.  Not dramatically, because the hills aren't high enough to be a dramatic contrast, but very noticeably so, all the same...'

 
The early blues collectors are as fascinating as the singers themselves and much has now been written about them too.  They included people like John Fahey and Al Wilson (Canned Heat) who also made their own music and performed with renowned bluesmen.  I don't usually quote Wikipedia but I thought this paragraph in the entry for Al Wilson interesting, and as I'm a bit short of time at the moment, I will just leave this with you, along with a clip of 'Going up the Country'...

'Wilson was a passionate conservationist who loved reading books on botany and ecology. He often slept outdoors to be closer to nature. In 1969, he wrote and recorded a song, "Poor Moon", which expressed concern over potential pollution of the moon. He wrote an essay called 'Grim Harvest', about the coastal redwood forests of California, which was printed as the liner notes to the Future Blues album by Canned Heat. Wilson was interested in preserving the natural world, particularly the redwood trees. When he died, so too did the Music Mountain organization he had initiated dedicated to this purpose. In order to support his dream, Wilson's family has purchased a "grove naming" in his memory through the Save the Redwoods League of California. The money donated to create this memorial will be used by the League to support redwood reforestation, research, education, and land acquisition of both new and old growth redwoods.^'