How do you go about photographing such a thing of beauty? It is a building, a biota and a time-capsule.

I can't really remember the photography - the tree (at St. George, Crowhurst in Surrey) drew me in and for several minutes I felt like a puppet on strings with my camera in hand.

The tree brought about a kind of focused frenzy on the minutiae. There are so me words in Alice Munro's "The Lives of Girls and Women" that touch upon the spirit of the day:

“…for what I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pane, crack, delusion, held still and held together, radiant, everlasting."

My interaction with the tree revealed a kind of visual and tactile storyboard. It told me that it was venerated because of its size and age, because of its gnarled associations with deep history, and because its surface, from certain vantage points, appealed to our innate Pareidolia.

I went inside and stood and looked up beneath the arc of its pan-millennium growth. I was at the centre of a living organism of reputedly four thousand years old. There was a strong sense of being embraced not only by the boughs of the tree but also by the past, the present and the future.

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