Everything in the forest is the forest
Thank you for being part of the network that shared the biodegradable photobook, Everything in the forest is the forest, during the summer of 2025.
This booklet is for you. It contains a test print produced by Clare Hewitt, Danielle Phelps, Carolyn Morton, and Emily Macaulay during the book printing process, as well as all 12 parts of the collaborative essay written by Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Marchelle Farrell, and Jessica J. Lee. The three writers took turns adding their words to each section of text, centred on the theme of leaves.
On a forest foor dappled with acorns, I watch her little steps. Her crouch as she bends to pluck one from the ground: a small green thimble of possibility. She squeezes it in her pudgy hand, presses it into the pocket of her coat. ‘Acorn,’ I say, letting each syllable stretch into the air between us. ‘Acorn?’ She returns it as a question.
Acorn.
Walking home from school, my daughter answers that we must be the dominant species on earth because we are the most clever.
I offer her a small capped, green round as we pass the oak tree by the church. Acorn again a question. My answer: the millennia of wisdom clasped in her fst.
Her eyes widen in understanding. ‘They have so much to teach us.’
We have so much to learn. It is a beginning.
I think about beginnings, what they mean; what they hold.
I think about holding, too – the how, the why, the when, the where, the who –and I remember an old phrase from long back.
From when I was her age, maybe even –
From tiny acorns, mighty oaks are born
– and her hand feels, suddenly, so small again, so green; so everything.
In the Irish language, the word for a cluster of trees is mothar.
When frst I see this word, I see mother.
The Irish word for mother is máthair
I see a many mothered wood, a truly treed world, and I cannot, then, unsee it.
Neither can I untree them, for that matter, these mothers.
They are in a circle, and they are singing. Woodsong.
The midwives call the placenta ‘the tree of life’. When I see the ones that I birth, the ones that nurture my children, I know why.
Some cells that implant in the womb cross this treeline, traverse branching blood vessels, live on among mother axils.
The oak sings oxygen that nourishes them, sustains me. It takes a village; each tree a city. 700,000 mothers to us all.
And I am struck by the image of an acorn, of an egg. An egg held inside my body inside my mother’s body. The egg that became me inside her small body –held in her mother’s womb. I am tumbled backwards through time, the age of a tree, and I think of how long these oaks have been standing here, and how short the season of acorns is.
I stand under the oak tree and try to draw my mind around the vastness of its life, 900 years in the making. My middling mid-life years of consciousness will not comprehend it. I close my eyes, lean my forehead to meet the rough bark, and while these atoms of mine that are in constant exchange with those of the world around me momentarily meld with the fabric of the tree, I feetingly understand.
These trees have ancestors they will never see. I travel between them, wrapping my small arms around bodies I can scarcely encircle, craning my neck to glimpse their crowns. Too tall, or I, too small. The god trees, garlanded and revered. On a high mountain in the middle of the island, I could only stand silent in the base of them.
Vast as they may be, ancient and strong too, there is a tenderness, a delicateness; a fresh-to-this-worldness.
Part of what leaves me breathless, leaves me wordless, in the presence of oak trees is this idea I can’t shake off: that they have only just arrived.
Newly born. Brand, brand new.
And I am made brand new, too, as I stand in their safe arms.
Oak-fresh.
In the Irish language, the word for leaf is duilleog.
The dictionary tells me I should think, as I say the ‘ll’ part, of the English word millions.
‘DIL-yohg’ – it offers me – my very own way in.
In towards the leaf. Towards leaf in my native tongue.
Towards my native language leaf in its millions.
I roll it around, taste its light-stroked green on my calcium-white teeth.
At the beginning of the talk, I read about the colour green. The wash of shades on the hillsides here, so unlike the green of English land. The oaks here are different: six-fngered stars; crescents strung on a vine. Leaves sharpened to a point –not the soft curl of England, but still sturdy. 橡 | xiàng | where wood stands in for tree and elephant stands in for sound.
The pointed colonial language pierces my tropical tongue. I do not know the words my indigenous ancestors would have used for green, for leaf. I do not know if they would have named such a ubiquitous thing. If they saw themselves as separate enough from it.
The oaks circle me, wordlessly. Their silent holding tells me that in the ways that matter words are not enough.
In the beginning months of the pandemic, an article makes its way around social media: “Are trees social distancing too?” it asks. It is an article about crown shyness – about the ways trees pattern their growth to avoid touching leaves. In crown shyness, the forest ceiling looks stitched with seams of light.
But this distancing is not – has never been – about isolation. Crown shyness is an act of community care.
I hold this small offering of a word inside my lungs: care
How it makes me think of air: cair
I think of how breathing the same air, a wee bit apart from one another, is a caring gesture.
Making space for all that needs to fll the gaps between us.
Care, this small, sharp word, embeds itself in those organs – so treelike that it all feels almost dreamlike.
Windpipe, trunk, bronchus, branch, alveoli, leaf: cair.
My lungs fll with molecules that the tree made, release parts of me in return. Analyse our cells in your lab, trace the origins of our parts – they seamlessly converge. We belong to one another. No atom stands lonely.
The distance between us shrinks to meaningful nothingness when we are all made of stars.
How does it feel to be a leaf? To feel the light and heat of sunshine on your cells?
To feel the dew drying from your tips, swaying as wind lifts you? I can only imagine as I sit here, watching the sparkling dance of uncountable leaves in the sunshine warming my upturned face, that it feels like joy.
Dappled light on the woodland foor. In a conversation once with a famous forester, he told me that the forests I knew well weren’t forests at all. Farms, he said, a trace of derision in his voice. I wanted to say: That is all we have nearby. I cannot change the past. But instead I nodded, silently agreed. I didn’t know how to say: but my heart
But my heart. But my hands. But my skin.
Love. Traces. Tingles.
Does the tree hold the leaves as her children? The forest her home?
Who took the frst steps in this dance of light & soil; composing and decomposing?
Whose is the verse; whose the chorus?
Who leads, and who will be the one to follow?
(Oh leaf, I will follow you, wherever you might fall.
Oh heart, the same, the same, the same.)
They tell me that leaves capture sunlight and turn it into sugar, that this alchemy drives all life. They tell me that libido –the instinct to love – drives our internal life.
I walk along the path on this late summer day, between shrubs dripping abundant with fruit, through clouds of seeds. Isn’t this alchemy libido? Isn’t this pure love?
I read that in Potawatomi, the language of one of the Anishinaabe peoples, the root word for berry is also the root word for gift.
Of late, I have been asking myself how to give more fully.How to receive in ways that feel true.
The sun outside of us, the sun inside of us: the dance between the two.
Love, ever and always.
Expansive. Frightening.
Love, the light that builds worlds.
In a book by an American journalist, I read about a scientist inserting fuorescent jellyfsh genes into plants so that leaves might gain the ability to glow light in the dark. They did so to study the response of plants when moved, torn, shredded – a pale green signal pulsating through the body of a plant. I am over-simplifying. But I think of this: the mirror-side of love. Of light.
An ivy leaf, for his Ivy doll, quaking grass for his quaking hearted mama, and I am struck, as if by sharpened light, by the tenderness on his face.
A face no longer chubby cheeked.
A face so full of wonder, so full of joy.
‘But mama, when you go to work, away from me: who will care for you?’
Oh son.
Oh sun.
This tenderness.
I dehisce from my son and fnd myself walking under the oak trees, beams of autumnal gold slicing the air. The year’s last warmth tender on my cheek, on the few remaining brown leaves clinging overhead. I turn my face to the sun like a fower in wonder.
Does the sunshine care for the tree that it nurtures? Does it care for this planet that it feeds? I hope so. I like to imagine that it does. It warms my heart as if it cares for me.
And I see myself at the centre, somehow, though I know I shouldn’t. I am my child’s centre in the night, when we all huddle under one blanket. But to the light? To the tree? I am small here, short-lived and short-tempered. I owe them humility only.
Here is a sturdy oak. Quercus robur. Pedunculate oak. An English oak.
Click through and translate. It is a Summer oak, too. A German oak. A Stem oak. A Common oak.
Common I like: an oak that is shared. Not a tree asked to carry the weight of a nation. The weight of violence or of empire.
My oak foors carry our shared weight. They are recycled timbers. I do not know their previous lives but here we are near the shipyards via which oak-hulled vessels once carried the products of Empire – the plants and the people of Empire – to their common fates.
Autumn leaves fall. Held in a network of roots they rot into the soil of tomorrow’s seedling oaks. My tears fall. Held in a community of hearts I mourn. I compost into love.
Night falls. Held in a cycle of seasons, I breathe between light and dark.
What is shared between then and now, between here and there?
What – in these stories of loss and pain; grief and fear; resilience and remaking – might we term common?
The leaf, on her tree, dances in the early morning’s rain.
Rain. Leaf. Tree. Morning. Dance.
Common things, to hold us.
The trees are never naked in the tropics of my birth. I once saw winter branches as death, a looming absence. Until I learnt that next year’s leaves were there all along, present in the knobbly buds of seemingly bare twigs. Biding their time to spring forth.
Is winter then not hope? The work done, awaiting the signal of sunlight and warmth to birth the new world that already lies within.
Is sunlight then not a midwife? The gentle touch of warmth her tender hand? What have we forgotten that the trees are trying to remind us?
What stories are we being nudged back towards, so gently?
As gently as a mother holds a blade of grass, given by her child, into her willing, grateful hand.
If hope can be a season, so too can remembering.
The season of fnding the way back.
There are days when the path branches and I fnd myself in a grove of disappearing trees. The ashes I will never see. And on other days the elms that grow here, which surprised me the frst time I saw them: because I had never seen an elm before. Who could really remember what an elm looked like? The mother of my tree knowledge held the elm leaf toward me, tracing a fnger: see the slant? The dip? The unevenness in this world.
When the helicopters fall to the ground, they are still attached to their leaf.
I think, then, about attachment.
The ways in which he and I, over three years in, are still so frmly woven together.
In the early days, the consultants called us as a dyad, and I loved the word instantly; reminding me, as it did, of the word dryad.
Wee tree nymph of mine.Outside we fnd a horse chestnut tree by its traces: barefoot, she steps on a sharpened shell. A wince, and I offer up a treasure in distraction. Shining brown, full in her small clutching grip. Is this, too, wood? I ask. I break a chestnut open with my boot, touch a hard nail to its cold butter fesh.
A seed. An egg. A tree.
I reach for her small hand with mine.
We humans hold one another lightly, attachment always with an eye to the point of separation. But networks of trees show connection which runs deeper.
Sun binding leaf holding tree containing forest enfolding planet. Leaves meeting rock, and all the creatures they hold creating soil, in which we all are grounded. This rich earth from which we all spring forth.
The morning I read about the oak tree, I began to make lists. 2,300 species, I learned, relied upon oaks. But this number effaced a lot: those we cannot quite see – bacteria and algae and all manner of creatures between – go uncounted.
A synonym for oak: home. In cavities, branches, and cracks, alliteration is unavoidable. Bechstein’s bat, barbastelle, beetles, and birds beyond number.
A synonym for oak: larder. Red-pink fowers, gorged upon by caterpillars, moths, and squirrels. Bees gleaning pollen from lime green catkins.
A synonym for oak: story. Each leaf a page, each branch a family, each acorn a brightly shining pathway.
A synonym for oak: haven. Look! See how the acorn has been held so close, she feels safe enough to grow?
A synonym for oak: mother. Listen! Hear how the earth’s beings love her; how their love becomes a song.
A synonym for oak: song. Their voices a bright green chorus! Woodpecker, woodwarbler, woodmouse, woodant.
Treecreeper, slender mouse-tail, green elfcup, jay.
A synonym for oak: memory. One treespan over a dozen human lifespans, remembering what we cannot.
The morning I read the oak tree my delusions dissolve on the many tongued light of my new earthly eloquence.
Everything in the forest is the forest is inspired by and created in collaboration with a circle of 12 oak trees at The Birmingham Institute of Forest Research in Staffordshire. The book you borrowed is part of a small collection of similar books, made to be shared. Some of the lumen prints* in the book were created by people living near the trees during the global pandemic in 2020. The others depict just a handful of over 8 million leaves produced by the 12 oaks each year.
The paper was made with birch polypore fungi, and the ink with oak galls, to be returned to the forest. Thank you for taking care of it, sharing it, and passing it on.
For Wren.
Love and gratitude to the Earth for her gifts, the forest, the community it inspired, and you for being part of it.
With thanks to Impressions Gallery, Arts Council England (National Lottery Project Grant), GRAIN Projects, The Birmingham Institute of Forest Research FACE facility, Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture, STEAMhouse, UWE Bristol, Stirchley Printworks & a-n The Artists Information Company.
Oak leaf test print © Clare Hewitt.
Text © Kerri ní Dochartaigh © Marchelle Farrell © Jessica J Lee.
Booklet © Clare Hewitt.
Original publication of Everything in the forest is the forest:
Project conceived and developed by Clare Hewitt.
*An image made by placing an object on a piece of light-sensitive paper and exposing it to sunlight.
‘Everything in the forest is the forest’ is part of a sentence from Richard Powers’ novel, The Overstory.
Lumen prints by Clare Hewitt and workshop participants Helen Armishaw, Lynn Ashburner, Amber Banks Brumby, John Dickinson, Gill Douce, Vicki Evans, Helen Keyzor, Lily Keyzor, Christine McDougall, Ralph Ransom, Donna Simmons, Alan Sockett and Jude Sockett.
Botanical ink by Carolyn Morton.
Fungi paper and screen printing by Danielle Phelps.
Spun linen thread by Alice Fox.
Design and binding by Stanley James Press.
Project management by Impressions Gallery.
www.clarehewitt.co.uk
No part of the book and this booklet may be used or reproduced without permission of the authors.