Skip to main content

The cherry tree

The way I go in to site B (through a hole in the fence, up an embankment) leads me to a viewpoint between some bushes at the top.  I am nervous about becoming too blasé about tresspassing here and try and make myself take a long careful look from the vantage point ot those bushes to see if there is anyone around before I descend and start taking photographs.  Before arriving in the vicinity today I heard no heavy plant engines and was fairly sure no-one was there working, but it's a big site and it's hard to see every corner, sooner or later I'll come unstuck.

This cherry tree.  Well I've occasionally photographed it for three years now.  I pass it on the way down.  It's beautiful.  Admittedly photographers are suckers for the complication of lines of branches of trees, but then again Pollack's drip-paintings perhaps touched upon this appeal.  In photos I like the way it can be like an overlay, a living organic form, onto the background of disrupted earthworks, land in upheaval, artificial, man-made.  This is off to one side, and so off-concept - sometimes making a picture non-compliant to even one's own self-imposed constraints is liberating in itself.

It's been several weeks since I've been to B and it had totally changed!  They must have a lot more money coming in from recent house sales at the front of the site, and are ploughing it back into speeding things up on the rest of the development.  There were piles of stuff everywhere, debris, hard-core, earth, rubbish, more and bigger machines.  And several deep holes with scarring and exposed and smashed obsolete subterranean concrete structures from the former metal foundry days

Afterwards as I was cycling away a car was speedily arriving where I'd just been, sudden horn blaring at the sight of me, and men giving me a dirty look.  I'm not sure if they were some security people who had been alerted and driven down ruining their Sunday Liverpool V Man Utd tv watching, or else it was just a bit random and they were just being a bit OTT anti-cyclist even though I was heading the other way.  There's a lot of strange people out there, I should know.