{"id":279,"date":"2023-07-31T18:02:18","date_gmt":"2023-07-31T17:02:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/irefuteitthus.local\/?page_id=279"},"modified":"2024-02-04T16:30:30","modified_gmt":"2024-02-04T16:30:30","slug":"nothing-but-trees","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/irefuteitthus.local\/nothing-but-trees\/","title":{"rendered":"And Now There Is Nothing But Trees"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\n\t\tAnd Now There Is Nothing But Trees\n\t<\/h1>\n\t

Gary Hill<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\"Divider\"\n\t\t\t\t\"A\n\tThey have planted saplings for the third war
\nOn the land of Esgeir-ceir and the fields of Tir-bach
\nBy Rhydcymerau
\nI remember my grandmother in Esgeir-ceir,
\nPleating her apron as he sat by the fire,
\nSkin of her face yellowy-dry as a Peniarth manuscript
\nAnd on her old lips the Welsh of Pantcelyn.
\nA piece of last century’s puritan Wales she was.
\nMy grandfather, though I never saw him,
\nWas a character – small, vital, tough, lame,
\nFond of his pint;
\nHe’d wandered in from the eighteenth centurt.
\nThey brought up nine children,
\nPoets, deacons, Sunday School teachers,
\nLeaders each of them in their little sphere.\nMy Uncle Dafydd farmed Tir-bach,
\nA country poet, a local rhymester,
\nHis song to the bantam cockerel famous around:
\n‘The bantam cock goes scratching
\nRound and round the garden…’
\nI went to him each summer holiday
\nOf shepherding and sketching lines of cynghanedd,
\nEnglynion and eight-line stanzas in 8-7 measure.
\nHe too brought up eight children,
\nThe oldest son a Calvinist minister
\nWho also wrote poetry –
\nIn our family a nestful of bards.\nAnd now there is nothing there but trees,
\nAnd their insolent roots sucking the ancient earth –
\nConifers were once was community,
\nForest in place of farms,
\nCorrupt whine of the southern English where once was poetry, was divinity,
\nA barking of foxes where lambs and children cried,
\nAnd in the central darkness
\nIn the den of the English minotaur,
\nAnd on the branches, as on crosses,
\nCorpses of poets, deacons, ministers, Sunday School teachers,
\nBleaching, rain-washed, desiccated in the wind.\n

‘Rhycymerau’ by D. Gwenallt Jones (translated from Welsh\u00a0by Jim Perrin)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The last stanza is the one that grips me most tightly. The poem refers to a government orchestrated environmental and social catastrophe, the compulsory purchase and clearing of hill farms, and clearance of the inhabitants throughout mid-Wales for the commercial growing of conifers for wood production. In 1951 a British government minister said:<\/p>\n

“We intend to plant 800,000 acres in Wales. We intend to change the face of Wales. We know there will be opposition but we intend to force this thing through.<\/em>“<\/p>\n

\u200bAnd force it through they did, throwing people off the land they had lived on for centuries, with the help of generous tax concessions for wealthy investors, including cynically, some members of the government of the day.<\/p>\n

The result, as shown in my image,\u00a0is an agricultural monoculture.\u00a0And now there is nothing but trees<\/em>…….their insolent roots sucking the ancient earth.<\/em>\u00a0Which, when felled,\u00a0leave a land\u00a0denuded of soil, washed away by the rain through drainage ditches. What soil is left is so acidic that nothing other than fresh plantations of conifer\u00a0will grow there.\u00a0Conifers were once was community.<\/em>\u00a0And worse,\u00a0each new generation of trees is showing a diminishing return, an encroaching desert gifted to current and\u00a0future generations\u00a0who are left to\u00a0settle the accounts\u00a0of the short-term profiteers\u00a0who probably never gave a passing thought to people like Gwenallt Jones.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\"Winding\n\t

‘And Now There Is Nothing But Trees’. Original images and written content \u00a9 Gary Hill 2014. All rights reserved. Not in public domain. If you wish to use my work for anything other than legal ‘fair use’ (i.e., non-profit educational or scholarly research or critique purposes) please contact me<\/strong> for permission first.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\"Divider\"\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\"Logo\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And Now There Is Nothing But Trees Gary Hill They have planted saplings for the third war On the land of Esgeir-ceir and the fields of Tir-bach By Rhydcymerau I remember my grandmother in Esgeir-ceir, Pleating her apron as he sat by the fire, Skin of her face yellowy-dry as a Peniarth manuscript And on … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"slim_seo":{"title":"And Now There Is Nothing But Trees","description":"Brief commentary on the damage caused to the Welsh landscape by commercial pine forests, inspired by a poem from Gwenallt Jones."},"footnotes":""},"folder":[27],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irefuteitthus.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/279"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irefuteitthus.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irefuteitthus.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irefuteitthus.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irefuteitthus.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/irefuteitthus.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/279\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1263,"href":"https:\/\/irefuteitthus.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/279\/revisions\/1263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irefuteitthus.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"folder","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irefuteitthus.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/folder?post=279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}