Good morning! New followers, might I introduce myself with a rambling photo thread of some of my favourite trees?

This ash tree (here and above) grows on Bredon Hill, Worcestershire. It's near our family house- when I was a baby, Mum would tie my cradle to its lowest branch. In Worcs, for lockdowns 1 and 3, I visited it every day.

This oak is a little further away, but was my favourite sitting/reading spot in my teens as you see right over the Vale. When I came back home for the first time after I moved to London after graduating, I found its huge front branch cracked off, lying on the ground.

It was the part that curved over your head as you sat.... A shock to see it gone. I've grown used to the split now, and on the ground the front half of the tree seems to attract wrens. I don't know why wrens especially (?) but there's more often a wren than any other bird.

Or walking another way, toward the village of Bredon's Norton, you pass two oaks each so old they have fences around (to protect them from the sheep and deer?) If you keep going and turn right, you enter some lower lying fields full of barn owls at night...

I'm now back living in Cambridge, where my flat looks out at this tree and I am researching a PhD on Wordsworth, pilgrimage, walking and holy place (originally Coleridge and John Clare too, but I leaned into single-author...)

It's a very good tree. The leaves are just coming out now and crows (I think?) are nesting, but this is from a rainbow in Michaelmas term.

I was so keen to do the 'academic' 'literary critic' thing that it's taken me a while to realise that the stuff I've always done alongside - reading nature books, wandering around outside, jotting about what I see - is the important stuff too.
(Woods on the ridge of Bredon Hill)

Moments like this - from a walk a few weeks ago

'There is no mysterious essence we can call a 'place'. Place is change' 'There is an animal mystery in the light that sets upon the fields like a frozen muscle that will flex and wake at sunrise' (both J A Baker)
(view towards the Malverns, from my upstairs desk in Worcs)

Brief story-time. I went to do English at Cambridge ticking various boxes - first gen uni student, Comp, low-income, disabled single parent - though that alone wouldn't alone show you I also grew up being read to, living in a flat in the Tudor manor poking through these trees.

Things Wordsworth and I had in common at Cambridge: we were late or negligent of college chapel, but spent a lot of time walking to Grantchester. Because you pass these trees on the way.

Or look at these trees in spring...

When I was considering postgrad after a time in consulting, I was torn between literary periods - the Reformation (landscape/pilgrimage) or my love of writers like J A Baker, RS Thomas & Nan Shepherd. Walking Offa's Dyke, I realised I should take another look at Wordsworth.

Things Wordsworth and I have in common include: a love of mountains, a curiosity about holiness, a tendency to digression (long threads) and periodic and debilitating writer's block.
Things we don't have in common: I'm not a famous Romantic poet.
Here in Grasmere churchyard.

I write and walk as much as I can and less than I would like.

This beech tree is on the east slope of Bredon Hill.

Oh, also, this is probably my favourite tree view in Oxford - on Brasenose Lane, as you walk from my favourite cafe ( @TheMissingBean) to the Bodleian. (Thanks to AHRC funding, I went for an MSt)

And this is fairly unbeatable in Cambridge, in the @Peterhouse_Cam deer park a few weeks ago

But the ash we started with still has my heart...

One last thing: coming up for two years ago I was baptised/confirmed in the CoE, after a long while variously atheist/agnostic/Quakerish. So you'll likely see me tweet about that too over at #AnglicanTwitter
(Prayer Book cover my best friend embroidered - my initials are SGVCD)

My friends are still largely non-Christian, My Dad is a Druid & my half-sister leans animist, but my main faith contexts growing up were Jewish (family friends) and Quaker (Mum, non-theist). Though one granny (seen here) converted to Islam & the other was a Marxist peace activist

It was my Grandad on Mum's side (a raincoat salesman in Birmingham) who taught her (and so me) love of nature, though, reading Richard Jeffries and Gilbert White and rifling through Books of British Birds, or wildflowers, or butterflies. No photo to hand, so here's granny again.

So, to return, I like learning about and engaging with all sorts of stuff across traditions, but am walking deeper into my own faith, too. (A burgeoning holloway, also on Bredon Hill)

I am not sure I am designed for Twitter, for each of these probably should have been an individual tweet not a long thread....
but can I end with the ash again in snow?