Member-only story
A Tale of Two Trees
ventus poetica arborealis
Two trees await the chop in a popular shopping street.
The terms old and ailing deployed by the council’s arborist-in-chief a way of grey-paving over the dissent now gathering apace in this less than salubrious quarter.
A controversy whipped up by the zephyrs of early summer,
the recent chatter relating to dieback in the local gazette
declared a false flag.
This is where the ash tree (I call her Daphne) shakes her arrowed locks beside the vape mart, mobile phone repair shop and dusty nail bar.
Her abundant canopy has dappled some pretty ugly things since well before the turn of the century, when the grand mansions stepped back and new-fangled emporiums let rip along the western mile.
When you look up into those verdant plumes you could be somewhere else entirely, not trudging a dank pavement of beleaguered bins leading to Primark.
She’s beautiful from every angle and may at one time have belonged to someone’s front garden. I cannot capture her shape, it defies sketching. Van Gogh would have drawn her again and again in painstaking pen and ink.
Stapled to her trunk is an official council bulletin,
placed too high up to read (deliberately)…but the tree…
