Georgia Ruth: Find our way back to the week of pines? - part 1

I've always been drawn to trees.

My first album, Week of Pines, was inspired by a small plantation of - yes, you guessed it - pine trees, set along the winding road which leads down to Nant Gwrtheyrn. Rather strangely, those trees have been cut down since that record was made, and so it's strange to think that they only exist in memory now, and in the lyrics of that song - which asks whether we can ever "find our way back to the Week of Pines".

This might explain why, when looking through the National Library archive of Geoff Charles' work, I was immediately struck by a beautiful photograph taken on October 3rd, 1953. Under the heading 'Montgomeryshire Forest Journey', it shows three men in trench coats, planting a tree.

The men, we're told, are C J Hopkins (the forester of Aberbechan forest), F C Best and B Willbank; the tree they're planting is a poplar.

Another image shows a stylish W H Rees (forester of the Mathrafal forest, near Meifod) planting a Tasmanian eucalyptus.

There's a song called Eucalyptus on my latest album, Cool Head. These are my favourite trees. I love the unmistakable smell, the way the silvery bark peels back like parchment, the way they seem to reach beyond the sky. And I was surprised, recently, to find one growing in Penglais woods in Aberystwyth. I wondered who had planted it - and why.

Toby at Oriel Davies tells me about Newtown's famous Black Poplar, which has survived not only the customary fungal disease, but the diverting of a river, and - in 1990 - the plans that were made to chop it down to make way for a car park. Since then, despite having had extensive surgery, and despite having had its upper branches removed, it still stands proudly overlooking the carpark.
I can't stop wondering whether the Montgomeryshire trees from the photographs survived. They seem so intrinsically linked with the passing of time, each branch a faithful record of another year passing. Planting a tree is a radically hopeful act, we hope for its survival even though we can't guarantee it in our own lifetimes. It's a reaching into the future, whilst also giving up control.

I'll be thinking more about this over the next few weeks, and hopefully starting to jot some lyrics and ideas down.