Hugging Trees Review

Trees of our Lives

Simon Fletcher kicked things off, talking about growing up on a smallholding and then encouraging people to chip in with examples of why trees are so important. Collectively, we did come up with a number of reasons, but I think it was Simon himself who mentioned books — rather appropriately as the venue was Waterstones!

Kuli Kohli, Poet Laureate of Wolverhampton, talked briefly about a memorable holiday in Crete which inspired a piece capturing cats doing as they please and chickens sleeping in the lemon trees, after the ‘tangy zest has cleaned their beaks’. I could almost feel the sun and smell the citrus. I also idly wondered if the cats across the road at The Qattery (another Fringe venue) knew what they were missing out on.

Kuli shared a story which is 300 years old, of locals in Rajasthan who got together to hug trees to (successfully – yay!) prevent the Maharajah from deforesting an area to build a new fortress and also explained that trees represent fun too. We all enjoyed a poem she read, by Lisa Marie Shepherd, about the Horse Chestnut of Hednesford Hills. ‘Leave them to soak in vinegar and hope for a sixer’ made me chuckle.

The poetry wasn’t the kind that many of us suffered through at school, because it was so easily relatable and short enough not to lose the audience. 

Food and travel were recurring themes — we all eat and trees are pretty much everywhere we go. Simon read a poem by Carol Howarth, a former librarian at Wednesfield, about childhood memories of the Maple Tree Festivals in Canada. So then I was fixated on maple syrup. 

If the organisers had chopped up lemons, poured maple syrup and then wafted the scent around, I’d have been begging for mercy. Or pancakes.

Oh and if you see a lady unashamedly hugging a tree in West Park, that’ll be Kuli as she apparently has form.