TREES 200

  The ‘Voices of the Future’ project is a hopeful project. It aims to create a space where children and young people can re-imagine the future. We are working with philosopher Johan Siebers to actively think through hope as a concept.  In our project we have been working with primary school aged children to re-design a school field. We asked children (aged 7-8) to draw images of what they would like to see in a field. Our development of ideas, with children, was a collective and hopeful action.   When we explored the children’s drawings and ‘small stories’ we could see an emergent space of practice open out that provided a more expansive vision of what treescapes could be. They were imbued with bugs, and teeming with activities, which cascaded over them like water. Planting with the children revealed a fascinating with earth and worms and the lived experience of trees in the ground. The world they inhabited was full of worms, and it presented a world to us in which i...

  One of the most hopeful sights to me is finding plants growing through, on and around human built structures. Given time and neglect, plants will reclaim the land, turning ‘order’ into ‘chaos’, or maybe ‘chaos’ onto ‘order’, but whichever way we view this, it is ultimately the stuff of life. We see evidence of the vitality of plants if we walk around the symbols of industrialisation, the railways, canals and bridges of the midlands and the north in the UK. Ivy takes a hold, covering bricks in green leaves and providing food and habitat for animals, buddleia grows out of cracks between bricks where mortar has failed. Before that, ferns and bryophytes germinate and spread on the surface of the bricks and in the spaces in between. Given a chance, plants reclaim their world. They have adapted to us, but ultimately will survive long after we have gone.   Around 300 years ago the great Mayan civilisation in central America, that had existed...