Seven Landscapes

Surprising emptiness, mundane observations, and birds as usual

1/7

Struck, I suppose, by the up-close emptiness of the landscapes around me. From a distance, or perhaps while driving through at speed, it’s possible to pretend, or imagine, that the few straggled leftovers of forest are alive with life; supportive and rich systems, providing homes to the winged and the crawling. In fact, the non-native origin of many tree species here means that they haven’t evolved to bear witness to a huge number of these tiny lives—even the sycamore, which to many of us would seem at home, is not native, and can only support a fraction of the species compared to a native oak, which can benefit over 2,000 different types of plant, insect, and animal during it’s long span of breath.

2/7

Watching how different people add sugar to their coffee—if there is any hesitation, if they leave a small scattering of debris or tidy up every last grain of sugar. There are a few things like this where I feel you can do a great deal of discerning—the putting of sugar in coffee; how people put their socks on; eating a croissant in public; marking a place in a book; interacting with sudden or heavy rain; running a bath for someone else; doing the washing up. Such things as these are all strong indications of a person.