isolated trees and the films people make about them

Before I can put The Falls away I have one last section to revisit, and this is biography 83, Geoffrey Fallthius. This tells the story of a short, unfinished, student film about a tree isolated in building works. Recursively and predictably, the film accompanying this biography shows a short, unfinished student film about a tree isolated in building works. 

Or maybe it doesn't, and I'm actually remembering the photo below, that I took in 2018. I'm going by my memory of the film. Although I own it in multiple formats, none are at hand right now.

Ostensibly, the film is by Geoffrey Fallthius, student pupil of Tulse Luper. Anagrammatically, actually, and narratively, all names collapse into Greenaway, which in itself feels like a recursion. Peter the stone, and the Green, away. 

This is nonsense of course, Peter Greenaway exists and has the awards to provide it. Unlike Geoffrey Fallthius. Geoffrey -

- at 19, the shortest and youngest of the Luper admirers who supported the Luper programme for the naturally evolving landscape.  The tree, a wych-elm, had been planted on the south bank of the Thames, when when the site was the garden of a London merchant who apparently specialised in the importing of timber for the manufacture of musical instruments. Now the tree was isolated in a sea of building construction, and its continued survival in the ocean of concrete  seemed  unlikely.

This vision of  isolated green islands in a sea of grey is very current to the direction of modern city trees, towards smaller, more containable, and more isolated plants that do not stab the sewers, or fiddle with the foundations. This is of course enabled by the felling of the existing mature tree stock, an expensive and protracted process marked by anger and demonstrations from some, but not all residents. 

The links above (bar the first, identification link) are from The Conservation Foundation's Elm Map, a fascinating site recording our fading elm population. It contains a myriad of notable trees of which my favourite is the Unknown Elm on Flood Street.

The sad state of our elms has been the subject of talk and more for many a year. I remember an Elm, back in the village, when as a child I was set a tree leaf quest by a science lesson, miring me in controversy when the teacher refused to believe that my leaf did indeed come from  an elm, leading to a furious signed letter from some village naturalist.  

It was the only elm in the village, putting me in mind of other famous isolates like the tree of Tenere, here summarised in a video which repeats uncritically the legend of the last tree to leave the desert.

Do you believe in the village Elm, like the last Tree of  Tenere, holding on gamely against the march of Dutch Elm disease? It certainly isn't in the Conservation Foundation's Elm database, which shows but one Elm Tree entry for the entire county surrounding that village. 

Hedgerow shrub elms notwithstanding, most mature Elms only linger on in place names nowadays.