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In 2023, Paul Armfield was commissioned by Gift To Nature to write five songs about the different trees that grow on Sibden Hill in Shanklin on the Isle of Wight, an area of woodland on the edge of a housing estate. In Armstrong’s own words, with the songs that make up the Trees EP, he wanted to explore the role of the trees and give each a unique voice in which to tell their story. These stories are augmented by smatterings of local lore, history, and facts, and embellished by string arrangements (by Norwegian fiddle-playing songstress Mari Persen), fingerpicked acoustic guitar, and Armfield’s warm vocals. It opens with the icon of British woody perennials, Oak Tree, a species much prized in olden days by the British naval fleet as well as for buildings and coffins, the song calling for their preservation (“The Carpenter thinks you look good/And eyes you up with mitres, nails and tacks/The boatbuilder with eyes of blue/He also has his eyes on you/For batons, beams and timbers, fore and aft”) the line “I plead with the woodsman spare the axe” being inspired by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem The Talking Oak while “bury me with an acorn in each hand” comes from the Romany tradition of interring deceased children. It also includes the words sessile and pedunculated, the two main types of oak in the UK.
If the oak is the king of the forest, then the Beech Tree is the queen, the word book being a derivation as slivers of wood were used to carve runic inscriptions, many of those in Sibden Hill carrying the initials of lovers, which, Armfield’s vocals her evoking early Roy Harper, prompts the lyrics “We’ll sign our names for all to view/The bark incised with me for you/A jagged heart pierced by an arrow/Witnessed by the tree-creeper, the fox, the crow, the sparrow”) while the naturally occurring ‘eyes’ in the bark prompt the song being written from the tree’s perspective as bearing witness to lives lived out beneath its branches. On his website, he does note that carving into trees can cause them to become infected.
Woods are divided into standard and coppice, the former with the oaks and beech and, in amongst them, the latter containing the Hazel Tree; their trunks are often cut (coppiced) every seven years to make hurdles, walking sticks, and fences. The gently picked and whistled track makes reference to the hazel dormouse, the song constructed as an altercation between the hungry rodent (“Send me down a filbert please/I needs me dinner, lunch and tea/At once”) and the tree responding “You cheeky sod, you’ll have to wait/We’re only at the start of May/And our next due delivery date/Is not until September”, a reference to Nutting Day on the 14th of September when hazelnuts become edible—a poor fit between hibernation and fecundity.
Tennyson is a source of inspiration again for Silver Birch; he apparently was the first to describe that particular species, the tree of healing and renewal (“Wrap it round a cut or bandage burns”), the song given a spooked guitar treatment with intermittent percussive woodpecker taps and a dark almost conspiratorial vocal that resonates with his drawing on folklore and old wives’ tales associated with the “Graceful Lady of the Woods” as well as the lichen that often grows on the bark. The song also references Robert Frost’s poem Birches about his childhood memories of climbing them. It ends on the whistling and quite jaunty Crab Apple Tree, which, unless you’re of a botanist bent, you might not know is a member of the rose family (Rosaceae), as the smell of its blossom testifies, the tree, which, frankly, is a tad ugly looking (“Poor arthritic fingers held up in sheer defiance/At broken angles and painful degrees”) with inedible fruit, often being derided with terms like scrab’, ‘bittersgall’, ‘gribble’ and ‘scrogg’, and yet, generally found on the wood edges, “the loneliest of trees” (or “anti-gregarious” as the naturalist Oliver Rackham described them), still possessed of its own beauty, the last line “whose blossom will promise more than it can keep” open to any metaphorical reading you may fancy. Clearly able to see the wood and the trees, it’s an absolute arboreal delight.
Paul Armfield releases his EP ‘Trees’ on June 14th and embarks on a rare six-date UK tour in celebration (dates below).
Trees is available on CD Only here: https://paularmfield.com/product/trees-ep/
Dates
Wednesday 12th June 19:00: Cafe No9, Nether Edge, Sheffield
Thursday 13th June 19:00: Prohibition, Liverpool.
Sunday 16th June: Knutsford Little Theatre (As part of the Knutsford Music Festival, a double header with The Magpies)
Thursday 20th June: The Green Note, London.
Friday 28th June: Gosport Museum and Art Gallery
Sunday 30th June: Sounds and Grounds, Cowes
