The pictures on this quantity, taken between 1906 and 1913, have been initially produced for Henry John Elwes and Augustine Henry’s The Trees of Great Britain and Ireland, an bold photographic catalogue designed, Elwes wrote, to “give a complete account of all the trees which grow naturally or are cultivated” in every nation. Filling seven volumes and a couple of,022 pages, the collection boasted greater than 400 pictures—largely taken by uncredited photographers—showing alongside exacting botanical descriptions of over 500 species.
Elwes and Henry’s challenge, conceived initially as a sequel to John Claudius Loudon’s Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum (1835-38), “was consistent with the prevailing ethos of the period to catalogue and classify”, writes Michael Pritchard, former chief government of the Royal Photographic Society, in an introduction to this new chosen version. The challenge additionally encapsulated the more and more widespread use of images as “a means to create a visual record to support science and new ways of classifying the natural world”, exemplified by Anna Atkins’s use of cyanotype impressions for her landmark Photographs of British Algae (1843-53). Reproducing over 60 pictures from Elwes and Henry’s seven-volume collection, Trees of Great Britain and Ireland gives a good-looking perception into the historical past of botanical images, and an undeniably stunning sequence of images that underscores the stately presence of bushes as a major motif in British and Irish artwork of the previous 120 years.
In the early 1900s, these pictures have been printed by the Autotype Company utilizing a high-quality collotype course of able to producing a diverse tonal vary, lending the images “a restrained and almost poetic softness”, writes the photographic historian Björn Andersson in his accompanying notes. Newly lithoprinted to honour the collosort gradients, the images right here stay lusciously detailed, the colliding shapes and textures captured in a broad spectrum of refined greys that render the topic of every image with exceptional readability, and anticipating the authority and focus of Sebastião Salgado’s pictures of bushes on the Anavilhanas archipelago by greater than a century.
Impossible degree of element
The footage on this quantity are given full-page reproductions, the bulk afforded the respiratory room of a double-page unfold, every sitting reverse a cool white web page, permitting the ability of every to talk for itself. It rewards cautious trying. Every specimen is a posh community of capillary-like branches, bearing inconceivable numbers of leaves, as within the breathtaking “Weeping White Lime at Hatherop Castle” that options on the duvet: the image’s regular tonal vary recording not solely hundreds of silvery leaf-shapes however the backdrop of an unmistakably English sky.
At instances, the accuracy and element of those pictures can appear to be a deliberate rejection of the unfastened, suggestive brushwork of Impressionist portray, as if mounting a renewed dedication to the world as it’s.
There is one thing profoundly goal concerning the skeletal bushes depicted of their leafless winter kinds—“Spanish Chestnut at Rydal” and “Common Maple
at Cassiobury” are significantly superb examples—revealing the “strange perfection” of their constructions, to cite the poet Wendell Berry. The pictures are distant forebears of the meticulous quill-pen drawings of Cesare Leonardi and Franca Stagi’s masterwork, The Architecture of Trees, first revealed in 1982, which options greater than 200 species rendered in a scale of 1:100, the bulk drawn twice (each with and with out foliage).
Each tree in Elwes and Henry’s collection options an individual or a gaggle of individuals to point scale. “Cherry at George’s Green, Slough” features a wide-based, gently curving ladder, with a person atop balanced precariously excessive to assemble cherries from the upmost branches. Perhaps inevitably, these figures lend the pictures a spectral high quality, a reminder that every image can be a marker of time; one can not assist however surprise which, if any, of the bushes depicted are nonetheless standing. “Silver Fir at Cowdray” towers above a hillside of felled trunks, an eerie premonition of the blasted landscapes of the First World War, just some years forward; one thinks of the shattered bushes in work by John and Paul Nash, as seen in The Menin Road (1918) and Oppy Wood, 1917. Evening (1918). The footage look forward to David Hockney’s Bigger Trees Near Warter (2007), Tacita Dean’s personal pictures of monumental specimens in Majesty (2006) and Crowhurst (2006), and even the wilful vandalism by Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers at Sycamore Gap, Northumberland, in September 2023.
Reproduced at a second when historical woodland makes up lower than 3% of the UK’s landmass, in accordance with statistics revealed by the Woodland Trust, the images in Trees of Great Britain and Ireland exist not solely as scientific curios however artworks rooting us in time and place, tethered to the previous and future. Above all, this publication is a well timed reminder of the position that bushes play within the panorama of our lives, their magnificence and endurance, their variety and there-ness. To quote the American poet W.S. Merwin, “they may be one of the things I will miss / most from the earth / though many of the ones I have seen / already I cannot remember”.
• Henry John Elwes and Augustine Henry, with an essay by Michael Pritchard, and Notes on Printing, Trees and Terminology by Björn Andersson, Trees of Great Britain and Ireland, RRB Photobooks, 128pp, illustrated all through, £35 (pb), 1 December 2025
• Rowland Bagnall is a author and poet