What is it?

A segment of a branch, which was cut from high up a pine tree as the tree itself was being cut down. It’s roots were gradually rotting away and the council felt it was too much of a risk to leave it standing in case it fell. When the photo was taken it had washed ashore after almost a year at sea.

Where is it from?

Fox Rosehill Gardens in Falmouth. A public park next to the Woodlane campus of Falmouth University.

How did you come to have it?

The night before it was cut down, I slept next to the trunk and was woken by the tree surgeons arriving. From a little way away, I then watched the scene in perfect silhouette: a man climb and dissemble a mountain. I went back and collected one of the segments I had seen fall.



Why is it important?

One of the first advice posters for a project I run was designed by a friend and was of this tree. It said: ”For late afternoon sunspots (between May and August) find this big tree in the college gardens’

After it was cut down I went back and the top half of the trunk, minus it’s canopy and branches, was laid on it’s side amongst other cuttings, pine cones and sawdust. It felt so like a whale. Both it’s size and scale, but also that you never expect to see it so close. Something that had lived vertical up to 90 feet is lying horizontal. When looking at it, wonder is combined with a hesitancy at a lost privacy, that something which should be viewed with a craned neck and a squint, is right there in front of you and each knot and wrinkle can be compared against the size of your thumb, can be reached out and touched.

I didn’t want to forget my view of it, my memories of it and the feeling of it: something great, both in scale and strength of each decision made, carried through to the tip of each branch.

At the time it was cut down, I was trying to understand what it meant to me.  I still don’t quite know, a mixture of all these things, but marking it felt important. In doing so, the metaphors fall away, the understanding grows and I hope the feelings remain.

Where do you keep it?

At sea.

On the day I collected it, I took the branch to the beach and set it on the water. It was a difficult, school gate farewell. Afloat on the water it righted itself so the pine cones which grow from the trunk sat upright like survivors clinging to wreckage. In the dusk light it became unfamiliar, a body in the water, with an aquatic privacy, part hidden below the waterline.

A year later, I was overjoyed to find it again, washed where I had set it to sea almost a year ago. Though the wood was smooth, I could recognize the chain saw cuts from each side, I knew how far it fell and on what day, where exposed branches had been worn away. I took it home and when the sea was warmer, I swam out with it, as far as I could go, nudging it, floating with it, holding on and left it loose on the tide.