THE TREES OF LUND, SWEDEN
Love and Absorbing Time
ANDREW M. KOBOS
To Professor Robert V. Moody
of Edmonton, AB, Canada,
– In Friendship
I have loved trees for a very long time. I love their shapes: the slenderness of their stems, their intricately tangled boughs and branches, the ruggedness and the patterns of their bark. In these shapes I try to discern a variety of associations. The leafless trees in the fall and winter are to me more intimate than the ones full of leafs. In the bare trees, one can perceive all their might and mysteriousness, their long hard life, their tiredness of resisting the elements, their torment, perhaps even martyrdom. On their bark or in their gnarls, one may detect their faces which are frequently appearing as a result of interplay between light and shadows.
My love for trees commenced as I began taking pictures. It was through my photography that I have learned to notice the unnoticed. Such is the case with the perception of trees. There are not many people who even vaguely can see them. I have been taking pictures of trees for approximately forty years: the first twenty years being in black and white photography and the next twenty mostly in colour.
In Edmonton, Alberta, Western Canada, for eighteen years I
encountered the predominant elm, birch, mountain-ash, and the less frequent
maple and spruce trees. In the not too distant Rocky Mountains, there were
mainly fir, spruce and pine trees. In the lower parts of the Rockies,
particularly in British Columbia, cedar trees also made their presence.
* * *
On October 8, 2001, I moved to Sweden to live in Lund, a university city in south-western Skåne. Five days later I went to the shores of the Kullaberg Peninsula overlooking the Kattegat Strait in order to take photographs of the picturesque cliffs with their forest covered tops.
A few more days have passed, as I discovered magnificent trees
in the Lund’s city parks and along its many streets. Since then, I have been
captivated, enchanted and bewitched by the trees of Lund. I have spent a lot of
time among them. I continue discovering more beautiful trees and noticing their
new photographic views. These are trees in sunshine, or on a cloudy day, or barely
emerging from the fog, or dripping with rain.
I keep returning to the trees at different daytime hours, in different lighting conditions. Principally, I am interested in various sections of the trees, forms thereof and their superstructure.
Even with such a choice of themes, photographing trees in a city is a challenge. I try to avoid having in frame the various city "elements" such as buildings, roofs, streets, alleys, etc. that are alien to the tree's soul and disperse the photo's composition.
* * *
The trees of Lund are truly magnificent, impressive and astounding.
Beech, linden, oak, maple, willow and screw-robinia, all dazzling with the grandeur of their stems. They all astonish with the strength of their twisted boughs, with their gnarls and knags, and above all, the texture and the colours of their bark.
The autumn and winter absence of foliage makes it possible to fully see the forms of stems, boughs, and branches as well as all the intricacies of their shapes. These shapes more than compensate for the lack of leaves and their rustle. Thus, the perception becomes purely visual, undisturbed by leaf covers on the branches and twigs, granulation of the tree forms and shadowing the sunlight.
The thick, heavy boughs of oak and linden implicate an imposing
power, pride and dignity. Spiry, nearly smooth beech trees offer an undistorted
purity of form.
Wound, mossy branches of screw-robinia broadcast a torment to our troubled world.
Huge linden stems, cracked and stripped of bark at places, in their lower parts carry strange nodulous growths and gnarls covered with flaked bark. Smaller of those may look like lumps sometimes seen on old men's faces.
Larger may resemble woman's firm breasts – one or two. And they attract alike...
Maple trees, similar to Canadian Maple, here called "tysk lönn" (German maple), are large trees of beautiful bark, which is regular in texture. Here and there, in the midst of upper branches, clusters of crow nests may be seen.
Maple trees of another kind, shorter, like plane-trees, have their branch coronas capped with wrinkled heads from which many thin twigs soar vertically. These maple trees look particularly beautiful in late fall with the remnants of their brown-reddish leaves.
I have always been fascinated with tree bark. Differing much between tree species, it is similar within the same one, yet somewhat different for every tree, very much like human fingerprints. Occasionally, there is on it a yellowish or greyish polypore fungus of a regular wavy shape with a few darker transversal veins. Structure and texture, a woven fabric of bark - one could say, together with its colours are truly amazing.
It is perhaps the bark that is the most wonderful facet of the trees of Lund. Never before did I encounter such a variety of bark. The uncommon texture of bark is enhanced by its rich colours. These comprise all shades of green, brown, yellow, grey, and even red and blue. The green comes from moss, ranging from a teal of thin lichen to a mellow dark green of thick moss. The bark colours are certainly due to the humid, fairly warm local climate that results from the relative proximity of the Gulfstream. These colours and their hues depend on the weather, the time of the day, and air humidity; paradoxically becoming richer though rather dull on a cloudy, humid and windy day. In the rain, wet bark offers yet different colours. On the other hand, on a sunny day, deep shadows with strong contrasts make the bark clearly three-dimensional. It is the case not only with the deep-rugged bark of oak, linden or maple, but also with the rather flat, as if scalded, bark of chestnut trees.
Such a three-dimensionality endows tree hollows, cavities, and knars left from broken or cut boughs, as well as stem semi-columns branching out into the roots, with an extraordinary peculiarity. In this peculiarity one may discern a snout of a multi-eyed monster or, more frequently, an abstraction of sexuality or a snakes’ whirl. Not surprisingly so, as at the Beginning there was the Tree of Knowledge and the Serpent and a sexual temptation which culminated in the consumption of the forbidden fruit of the Tree.
The bark is one of the many striking examples of symmetry occurring in Nature. My good friend, Dr. Robert V. Moody, a distinguished mathematician at the University of Alberta and an excellent photographer, has since long been working on mathematical representation of symmetry. I have been studying the symmetry of the tree bark photographically.
Beech trees, quite frequent in Lund, provide encounters of a special kind. It is the slenderness of their stems branching into two or more vertical trunks, the almost geometrical purity of their boughs' lines, the semi-columns of the stem low above the ground segmenting down into the roots, and, again, the bark. Ash or olive-green coloured, with the hue depending on the lighting and even on the season, almost smooth, the beech bark indeed invites to a caressing touch.
On the smoothness of the beech bark there may appear patches of roughness, as if a chipping. Together with the trunk's slits, twists, folds, convolutions, and knars these patches sometimes resemble human faces.
On the beech bark there also are cracks that stick out somewhat, looking like short, clod-like, coarse incisions. Through the shadows of their edges they acquire an unusual allusiveness to female sexuality.
The trees live their long lives, much longer ones than those of humans. But they too, subject to the unyielding time, wane and cease to exist. From time immemorial being but links in the chain of life, young first, mighty while adult, when old they mould, the trees rot and decay starting from their stems. A visible rotten mould with a cracked, intricate plate- or clod-like surface, strewn with tiny borer's canals constitutes yet another, this time sad, face of the tree.
Wood constitutes tree's afterlife. From wood's grain pattern, as from tree's bark, one can read not only the tree's species, but, in part, one may guess its particular past as reflected in the wood’s knots or gnarl veins. Robert Moody, already mentioned here, has recently suggested to me that I "go looking for some old craftsmen who still respect trees and use them with love and skill to make things for with them there could be wonderful opportunities to see cut wood." I intend to do just that.
* * *
The trees are the only thing I love in the city of Lund. I feel comfortable among them, they make up my own multidimensional space and have become part of my inner realm.
In the early 1930s, a Polish writer Julian Ejsmond wrote a collection of charming stories entitled The Lives of Trees. It may sound like "The Lives of Saints," and properly so, why in trees there is embedded an age-long past. My friend Stefan Grass once wrote that "every tree sends us a signal, rarely though are we able to decipher it."
Without anthropomorphising the trees, I quest for their spirit.
For me, the Spirit of Tree is its strength, might, the ruggedness of bark, the
magnitude of boughs, the subtle tangle of branches, the rotten mould, the
tormented roots above the ground, and the rustling of leaves. Barbara, my wife, wrote that
"in conversations with trees I absorb time hastily." And it is the case.
Lund, March 2002.
Copyright © 2002-2005 Andrew M Kobos
