I happen to be sorting through multiple albums of ‘art’ – packs of life drawing images, some done in double handfuls of wax crayon, others layered sketches created in 30 seconds to a couple of minutes – I am after the ink sketches turned into larger drawings I have done of some of the trees in Markstakes Common. The magic of Beth Gibbons comes onto BBC Radio 6 Music and I put ‘Floating on a moment’ on a loop. I have to get the lyrics too ‘On the path with my restless creativity’ got my attention, as did ‘A [passenger on no ordinary journey’ and the nihilism of ‘All going nowhere (nowhere) like Macbeth’s spoliquity on time ..

The above were originally created on long sheets of wallpaper backing paper in wax crayon. I then traced them and transferred the image to cartridge paper to paint as watercolours.

What I’m interested in today are the ink sketches of ancient and other notable trees of Markstakes Common I worked up ‘in the field’ and brought home to figure out as entire trees – using photos. I am supposed to be working up one tree (at least) a week, ostensibly as a linocut (A3 or A4 size), or as a ink drawing – A2 at largest. The ink prints I later colour using water-based coloured pencils, or watercolour, though chine collée is my preference where I can get it to work. I may layer the images in Adobe Express and I usually create a montage (Hockney in miniature) as a better way to try and capture the entity of the tree as an entity. I’m a long way from cracking it.

This hornbeam, like another nearby, has successfully layered. What is the age of the sapling? Fifteen years old or more I guess. Around this tree (hornbeam, tree 32) there are many other hornbeam (they form and dominate in groves). Another has self-layered like this, a third has come down beneath the shadow of a huge beech tree and companion oak … come down and from all appearance dead, until you look closely and see that a single stems lying out across the woodland floor has plenty of growth in it.

I’ve imagined the tree with people in it, or on it, or against it. I’ve placed a finished life drawing against a tree but have yet to make the connection. I keep returning to Ariel in ‘The Tempest’ made prisoner in the broken trunk of a tree … and my own story of the girl living in the woods, or of woodnymphs. All very Arthur Rackham. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

So I am into drawing trees. Its an intellectual challenge on a least two levels: capturing the tree as an observed record of how it appears but also understanding its story of growth in this woodland setting. And how we see trees in the wood, with the woodland around each tree, the tree canopy closing in from spring through summer to autumn so that all you see is a trunk and some limbs, to its nakedness over winter – the life drawing I suppose I’ve been practising for the last seven years.

This hornbeam (tree 23) came down fifty years or so ago – perhaps it came down in October 1987? There are plenty of indicators that this and other long fallen oak, hornbeam beech came down at this time. Here the tree grows on. There are many other hornbeam trees in this condition, all younger trees, some of them dead and rotting, others survivors like the above, one or two only showing a row of new stems from the trunk as if it was layered by some hand creating a hedge through the woods.

I thought the other day I should be drawing the dens that are scattered through the woods. I’ve made a few videos of the woodland streams … there’s so much going on, most of the time, most of the year (though least of all in the dead of summer … unless it rains).

And don’t start me off on the mushrooms, which after consuming a few books (and a few mushrooms) I now call fungi. Tasked with giving a talk on the ‘fungi of Markstakes Common’ I thought I had 40 or so to bring up, but had over 100 to pick from by the time I was finished. Scarlet elf-cap are out by the way.

Trees have multiple limbs, they have fingers, they have nobbly bits, they have character and they are far more complicated that a human with their truncated bodies two legs, arms and a head. However, a tree keeps still, and they don’t change much (usually) over the months. Some fall, all lose bits, sometimes a big bit – usually just their leaves, or a some worthless twiggy bits.

The above is oak (tree 13) which close up from the path looks like a kid’s climbing frame that has been dropped onto concrete from the back of a plane – it is mangled and broken. Step back and you see how a couple of significant stems have broken off, one only 18 months ago (for the next year like a vast, wind-tosted umbrella the drying out leaves hung there). From the pasture or meadow, stepping back 80-100 yards and the tree looks like far healthier, like a huge piece of broccoli, the canopy it shows to the sky complete, even ‘youthful’ looking for an oak.

Of the 34 ‘notable, ancient and veteran’ trees of Markstakes Common I have drawn and sketched all several times, photographed each many, many times in all seasons and weather, and from all angles short of taking to the air (drone required, a ladder might help for the giraffe’s point of view). Climbing the tree, or a tree nearby doesn’t help much … everything is lost, like trying to draw someone while standing in a busy crowd on the street.

This beech tree with a companion oak (tree 12) I have now drawn often, worked into a print, painted and in various ways experimented with. It is still a work in progress. This last image is create with modelling paste and a palette knife. The plan is to use files and sandpaper to create a 3d or ‘raised’ effect and then paint it – the texture of the oak’s bark is very different to the beach, the leaves in autumn distinct as the oak holds its leaves for longer.

Trees have meant something to me all my life, from the so called ‘Andy Pandy’ tree in the garden of our 60s semi in Melton Park, Gosforth which I don’t remember, but have cine-film transferred to video of me dancing in and out from under the dangling branches of a young weeping willow; on to the many trees of our garden in Fencer Hill Park (climbing them, cutting branches off, taking entire trees down) to acres of trees at school in Northumberland. For each stage of my life a tree? The ancient mulberries of the Master’s Garden at Balliol College, Oxford … I’m stretching it a bit though. There are no London trees, except those that came down in the 1987 hurricane. A hollow sycamore in a hedge in Long Compton. A twisted, broken sycamore at my in-laws, kids on a swing hanging from the limb of a huge beech in Eden Hall …

With all the trees I am getting the hang of how much I can include or miss out in relation to the twiggyness of it, and how to represent the tree’s canopy. A park, pastureland, garden or ubran tree is so much easier because it is there in isolation – not so in an ancient wood where trees have been competing for light and twisting into the canopy alongside each other for centuries. ‘We’ don’t talk about a trees age apparently, it is a thorny subject – short of cutting it down there are too many variables, so you consider its trait and location to build up a history. An ancient wood is at least 400 years old and has been intact for all of that time. The oldest trees are likely to be over 200 years old, though ancient looking trees can be younger, silver birch is only likely to last 150 years or so, whereas an oak at 200 has not reached maturity, it is still growing, reaching out and filling up (if it has such a chance). Several the ancient trees in Markstakes Common have been cropped; each of oak, beech and hornbeam can show signs of coppicing or pollarding.

This is an ancient oak (tree 13) – ‘ancient’ because of its ‘ancient’ traits rather than age or maturity. For an oak it is mature, but hardly yet in a state of significant die-back and decay. I have drawn it a dozen or more times now and taken well over 100 photographs in snow, rain, winter, spring … all in an attempt to find a way to show the entire tree in one image. This is impossible. The further you get away from the tree the less you see of the trunk, and the trunk is more than a face, it is like a collection of faces and moods and the ‘wrinkles’ in the bark indicate its struggle on the edge of the wood, as does the moss and lichens and multiple, lower reaching twisted and broken branches.

This is hornbeam (tree 5), the only ‘veteran’ tree in Markstakes Common. The chandelier like silhouette is because it, like several of the trees here, is a pollard. There has been 100 to 150 years (or more) growth since it was last ‘cropped’ in this way. all the major limbs are the shoots that emerged from the last pollarding. In the wood, though on the eastern boundary, many of these limbs have struggled to compete with the mature hornbeam and beech outside its circumference. The vast, fishing rod-like bend of the branch dropping to the left looked like it might eventually self-layer as happens elsewhere in the wood, but this year a crack in the twist at the apex of the curving branch broke and the entire branch has since died. There are several ‘fingers’ from this tree which have died and broken at some time over the last fifty or more years: dead wood litters the ground around the tree and one side, perhaps a third of the trunk, is decaying and often host to a variety of fungi, from porcelaine, to slime mould.