Month: May 2018

The Bristol Tree of the Year Competition, 2018

The Bristol Tree Forum is hosting its first Bristol Tree of the Year Competition.

The purpose of the competition is to increase public awareness of the arboreal heritage of Bristol and the many benefits that trees bring us. We intend to make this an annual event.

The competition will be in four phases:

1    Submitting your chosen tree

Local Bristol community groups and organisations are invited to submit their candidate tree before 1 September 2018. Just one tree per group or organisation may be submitted. The tree must be within the Bristol City Council boundary and in a public space accessible to everyone.

2    Voting for your favourite tree

Voting opens on 15 October 2018 and will close at midnight, 15 November 2018.

3    Announcing the winner

We will announce the winner and the runner-up during National Tree Week, which will be held between 24 November and 2 December 2018.

To enter the competition, please download and complete this application form and submit it to:

TreeoftheYear2018@bristoltreeforum.org

Alternatively (or as well), you might want to take up the Woodland Trust’s initiative and celebrate the street trees near you. If so, then click here to apply for a Street Trees Celebration Starter Kit.

Here are the entries so far:

Meet the Candidates

Plant a tree for Paul Dirac

The other day, as I wandered around Bristol looking at the delightful, newly planted trees so many generous Bristolians have paid to have planted, I passed No. 13 Monk Road in Bishopston – the house where Paul Dirac, the famous theoretical physicist, was born and lived in as a child. He is regarded as one of the most significant winning physicists of the 20th century.
Sadly, the line of lime and plane trees that grace the road has a prominent gap where a tree is missing. It is just outside No. 13 (which has a blue plaque). There was probably one there once, though.
The Paul Dirac Gap
Wouldn’t it be great if we could get it replaced…and perhaps build on that to plant other Blue Plaque Trees where famous Bristolians once lived and so celebrate their lives.

In Hintock woods…

‘The casual glimpses which the ordinary population bestowed upon that wondrous world of sap and leaves called the Hintock woods had been with these two, Giles and Marty, a clear gaze. They had been possessed of its finer mysteries as of commonplace knowledge; had been able to read its hieroglyphs as ordinary writing; to them the sights and sounds of night, winter, wind, storm, amid those dense boughs, which had to Grace a touch of the uncanny, and even the supernatural, were simple occurrences whose origin, continuance, and laws they foreknew.  They had planted together, and together they had felled; together they had, with the run of the years, mentally collected those remoter signs and symbols which, seen in few, were of runic obscurity, but all together made an alphabet.  From the light lashing of the twigs upon their faces, when brushing through them in the dark, they could pronounce upon the species of the tree whence they stretched; from the quality of the wind’s murmur through a bough they could in like manner name its sort afar off.  They knew by a glance at a trunk if its heart were sound, or tainted with incipient decay, and by the state of its upper twigs, the stratum that had been reached by its roots.  The artifices of the seasons were seen by them from the conjuror’s own point of view, and not from that of the spectator’s.’  

Chapter 44, The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy