"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape -
the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter.
Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show." ~ Andrew Wyeth
The quote above, by one of my favourite artists, speaks to the art of winter trees but also speaks to those 'thin places' - those places that are between here and there and where spirit resides. Here, on the eve of Winter Solstice, I look for the thin places that must exist at Fat Hummingbird Farm. This farm has abundant and good winter bones and spirit is subtly revealed.
The Black Locust trees, festooned with blossoms in the spring and pretty leaves in the summer, have a sculptural beauty in their bareness and twisted growth. The limbs look tortured and drop easily to the ground in the stiffer winter winds. The dropped limbs lay at the trees' feet. I am reminded of mouse bones and bleached grinning skulls. The branches make wonderful diving rods, apparently. As we may be seeking a well in the next year we will see if the local diviner uses the Black Locust.
The apple trees still hold red apples at the end of their contorted and whealed limbs, offering on their outstretched lines a globe of colour to the powder-shaded skies. The colour and the apple itself prevails beyond the frigid blast of winter. The Celts believed the apple is symbolic of the endurance of love and the Druids believed that eating an apple could transport one to other worlds - open one's eyes to the thin place. The tree stands as an invitation.
Some of the white birches still hold in crooks of their branches the creeping ivy and wild rose tangle that draped them in the summer - though now the dead foliage looks like dreadlocks. Untidy and mussed but still with some of that Rastafarian thatchy endurance. Other birches, the yellow in particular, have the fine, delicate twigs at the top - greyed by the winter air and looking, from a distance, like smoke against the sky. The birch is symbolic of renewal. I expect that as the trees dress again in the spring that the accompanying ivies and roses will too.
I love the pared-back, naked and chiseled look of bare winter trees. I love the muted palettes of trunks and bark. I love how the gestural trees create shadows in the cast of winter light. Hoarfrost or snow can gather in the crooks and angles of the branches and soften the tree but in a completely different way than do summer leaves.
Winter light is softer - it opens shadows and eases highlights. The curdled texture of a winter sky is the perfect backdrop to a black and white world.
I love ice patterns on bark. I love raindrops frozen and suspended at the end of a tree's crooked finger. I love the architecture of the bare trees and the branches, and the shadows they throw, on the landscape.
I love that our willows are Goddess trees and that our oaks are considered wise.
I love that in the starkness of winter lines and winter light, long shadows and gestural shapes, the bare spirit of the tree is revealed. And I know those think places are there - of that I am sure.
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