Windthrow

As morning broke on 27th Nov 2021 the catastrophic impact of what had happened overnight was revealed. The storm was named Arwen and was an extratropical cyclone that generated powerful winds from an unusual direction devastating large swathes of the British landscape. I find the word Windthrow disturbing. It is a term used by arborists to describe the natural event of a tree being uprooted or displaced by wind. As I investigated my own local woodland after the storm I found mature trees ripped from rock and earth but as a photographer I was intrigued by the subterranean world that the storm had revealed. I have always found the sight of a newly fallen tree unsettling and a little jarring but the scale of this event was quite arresting. The bare and newly exposed root systems presented like open wounds in the landscape.

The root systems of different trees are in fact all intertwined and growing together. These root systems form a Mycorrhizal fungal association - a mutualistic relationship where the fungus grows in the root and provides the root with nutrients and water collected from the surrounding soil. The fungi provide a messaging service to the trees and in return receive the produce of photosynthesis from the tree.

Soon after the Storm Arwen I became interested in the idea of the photograph documenting a past event that has taken place in a landscape. 16 million trees were brought down across northern England and southern Scotland that night. As I continue to revisit these uprooted trees I witness the resilience of the woodland, the healing of the land, the positive changes in the forest understory, but I will always feel unsettled by Windthrow.