In today’s Acts of Tree Kindness post with the Urban Tree Festival we are inviting you to use words to respond to the trees that you encounter in your daily life. Using words to name or respond to trees can bring them to life for people in different ways, and lead to us valuing and protecting them.
If you don’t want to write your own, do you have a favourite tree-related poem or story that you’d be happy to share?
Following on from yesterday’s Creative Noticing activity we are asking you to consider the role that words play in giving trees names. Whether scientific or common names, we are inviting you to use words in a playful way to create a simple poem, story or sign/label for a tree.
Depending on where your tree is it may already have words associated with it. Some trees bear plaques showing that they were planted in remembrance of someone that has died, whilst others were planted to commemorate an event in history. Sometimes a tree may have a tag or label sharing its Latin and/or common name.
All of these can be starting points for your own writing, or simply captured in a photograph. Please share with us using the #ActsOfTreeKindness and #UrbanTreeFestival hashtags.
On Twitter Rachel Summers (@curiouswilds) has been sharing images of trees that she has labelled by writing their names on the pavement beside them, often with a little background information on the tree, such as how that species was used in the past.
The Ash Tree Stream project with Andover Trees United, which focuses on using art to engage people in learning about Ash trees and Ash Die Back Disease, has a free downloadable resource that you can use to identify the Ash (Fraxinus Excelsior). You can also download this free Tree ID App from the Woodland Trust website.
For some extra inspiration on tree related words and sounds, have a listen to this Radio programme on the Susurrations of trees, the ‘songs trees sing in the wind’, and how writers and musicians have captured these. This link is also included within the Climate Museum UK collection of tree related images and resources available via Pinterest. Visit our Pinterest boards here.
Climate Museum UK 
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