Ruth Pickvance interview

Ruth Pickvance (Founder & Director of Element
Our super-energetic director Ruth has worn several hats: international mountain runner, teacher of literature, race director, Italophile, beekeeper and writer. She has a long and on-going connection with the wilder side of Italy where she owned a remote house for 20 years.)

Me

So what do you like about trees?

What they bring to the landscape and I absolutely love to watch trees/woodland at a distance through the seasons. So you can literally see the colour of the landscape changing over the course of the seasons by looking at woodland.

So at the moment we are in early winter and the oak trees are the last trees to lose their leaves. So they still have their leaves on and they are brown. SO the woodland at the moment is looking very very grey/purply and a little bit brown because the woodlands that I look at haven’t yet lost all of their leaves.

I love looking at trees on mass as part of the landscape and I love the way that you get very often the trees softening the landscape so you can get the mountains and the woodland and I really like that sense of contrast that trees give the landscape.

That is a kind of macro view on woodland as if I was a bird flying over it and looking over at it from a distance.

Fantastic colours! I could take a time lapse photo of the woodland every month going up the mountain where I live here and the colour of it changes every single month and at the moment the trees haven’t got any leaves but the on mass colour is kind of purple/grey/green and really silvery almost. This changes throughout the year really.

That’s one of the things I love about trees really. I love kind of what they give to the landscape as on mass.

Your job now is focused on being in trees and stuff the whole time?

Yes, partly in trees, partly out of trees. One of the things I love about trees is just that when you get up close to them they are really really fascinating. SO for example I really love walnut trees and the bark on a walnut tree and it is like the skin of an elephant, really sort of grey and hard and beautifully coloured. All the tree barks are different, you can actually recognise different trees by their barks.

And then you have got the buds on the trees in the spring are all completely different so for example you have got walnut trees have really really black buds on them and then you get this incredible yellow flower, like a lambs tails, hanging down. And then you get the leaves coming and the leaves are really mossy green. The you get the actual walnut developing from that.

So when you get up close and actually into trees you see that actually they have all got very different barks, really different leaves, really different buds, really different shapes to the trees.

If you look at sycamores and ash trees for example their actual architectural shape is really different of that of an oak tree or a walnut tree.

Do you have any stories about trees or any incidents that have happened with trees?

Hahaha.

I have lots of stories about trees but they are mainly based in Italy but for the purposes of your book you could link it to Britain.

For example I know a wonderful story about 2 brothers in a family and when their parents eventually died they inherited different parts of the land so one of them inherited on field and the other inherited another field. On the boundary between the 2 fields was a big cherry tree and each one of them thought that they owned this cherry tree and they couldn’t agree. They fell out for a life time over who owned this big cherry tree between too fields!

Lots of stories about mushrooms and trees and how they support eco-systems. There wouldn’t be any mushrooms if there weren’t any trees because there is a symbiotic relationship between the mycelium (invisible matt a tree puts down around it. OS particular types of mushrooms actually grow in relationship to particular types of trees.

Have you got any stories to do with Sam (her black labridor) and trees?

There must be something!

There must be something mustn’t there, Sam and trees…

I’ve got a story of one day I came downstairs and I could only find one of my slippers. The I looked and looked and looked and Sam had taken out this slipper and he had buried it underneath one of the oak trees outside.

He had a favourite tree that he liked to go and lie under.

He often thought he could help tree felling and bringing wood in but actually he just made it more chaotic than it was help really.

You know then they say when you’re burning wood that you have cut from trees different wood burns with different qualities and they have got different heats and different calorific values. There is a wonderful book called ‘Wild Wood’ by a chap called Roger Deakin and he writes all kinds of stuff about wood in there (wood on jaguar cars is Walnut).

Sam would just love the smells and the kind of poking around in woodlands really because of the diversity of life that a woodland support. He was always in seventh heaven in any kind of woodland really.

I think that sheep. I hate sheep. Sheep are my big enemy because they destroy woodland basically, they destroy new trees and they destroy saplings. There are a lot of the hills we see now, really up in the north, where they just have heather growing on them. They would have had trees growing on them. It is the intensive sheep farming that has stopped any trees being able to grown on our hills at the moment.

It is a lovely time of year this because you have got the berries coming on the horthorn trees, very very bright red against the beautiful winter blue sky. Every season brings with it some beauty and interest from trees I think.