public/about/portrait.jpg This is my own tree hunt: finding trees, working out what they are, and having a thoroughly good time doing it. It's centred on Bristol, my home city, and it wanders further afield whenever I do.
I want to learn more about trees. Not only to be able to name them — though naming them turns out to be a large part of the pleasure — but to notice them properly. To appreciate them. To stand still under one for long enough that the noise of the day settles. And to understand what each one is actually doing for everything around it: the soil it holds, the birds and insects it feeds, the street or field or wood it belongs to, and the people who pass it every day without looking up.
Trees carry as much culture as they do carbon. The folklore, the poems, the old craft uses and the arguments about what to call them matter to me as much as the Latin does, so they are logged here too.
Underneath all of it is a simpler aim, and the honest one: get outside more, and spend more time with nature.
I have always loved walking and being out in nature. What changed was eight years ago, when Yosemite — our spaniel — arrived and started needing walking twice a day. Since then my wife Caroline and I have walked Ashton Court more times than either of us could count.
Walking the same ground over and over is the part I didn't expect to love. The same paths, the same trees, week after week — and never the same twice. Bare limbs, then bud burst, then a canopy so thick you can't see the sky through it, then the whole lot on the floor inside a fortnight. Stay at it for a few years and the slower changes start showing as well: a limb down after a gale, a tree gone altogether, saplings that were nothing in particular quietly turning into trees. You only get that by turning up again and again. This log is my way of holding on to it.
Every tree in here is one I have stood under. I photograph it — the whole shape, the bark, the leaves, and whatever flowers, fruit or cones are going — drop a pin on the map, and where I've had a tape with me I measure the girth. Girth is measured or it doesn't exist, so plenty of these records simply say not measured, and that's fine.
Identification is a joint effort. An AI does the first pass from my photographs and it is genuinely good at it, but what it gives me is a proposal, not a verdict, and it has to say how sure it is and what clinched it. Then I check — books, and better still going back and standing under the tree with a leaf in my hand. Where I disagree, my determination takes over the page and the machine's is kept underneath it, struck through rather than deleted, so the record shows what was said and who got it wrong.
Where a tree already appears on the Trees of Bristol register — Bristol City Council's asset list, the Woodland Trust's Ancient Tree Inventory, the university's estate and a long tail of individual surveyors' own work — I tie the two records together and credit whoever surveyed it. Their register and my log aren't competing claims about the same tree; they're different kinds of record, and the interesting thing is usually confirming that a tree is in both.