Arboreal photo-blogging roundup

Luara Hegfield has been posting some wonderfully atmospheric photos of trees to accompany her blog entries for the “river of stones” January mindful writing challenge (see the Writing Our Way home blog for more on that). I especially liked this one of tree branches at dusk, these three of trees and water, and this lone birch.

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Welsh painter Clive Hicks-Jenkins blogged some photos from his holiday visit to the medieval town of Sarlat in southern France, which included a shot of some awesomely grotesque trees which look as if they’ve been pollarded every year since the 14th century.

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On Wednesday, London blogger Jean Morris shared a stunningly blue collage calling attention to “The shapes of trees.”

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Back on January 4, Buddhist nun and photographer Seon Joon expressed her “new year’s resolutions: worship” in visual form, with three very arboreal photos. She included this quote:

I am glad I belong to a religion that worships a tree.
—Stephen Batchelor, Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist

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Too much of a good thing? The trouble with unplanned urban tree planting

The UK blog Save Our Woods features a guest post from the chair of a tenant management organization (TMO) for a housing estate in London. George Arkless finds himself in the awkward position of having to advocate for tree removal, and reflects on the consequences of poor planning for urban trees.

Poor planning, in the residents’ view, means that the problems we now face are numerous, and while anyone from the council we have invited to look at the problems have agreed with us felling trees is such a sensitive matter that no one has been willing to put it in writing.

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Just as there is delight when I get out of London and see trees in their true magnificence, or seeing a tree that is alive with life, or a tree so beautiful it just takes your breath away. Why should I need to leave the neighbourhood I live in to see such beauty around me?

Read the rest.