Women in Trees

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Forestry England have commissioned the People’s Picture to create a photo mosaic which will go on display at the Women in Forestry, The Lumberjills Story exhibition at Grizedale Forest this May. A Swedish arborist working in the UK and Sweden, Bo has an impressive career in arboriculture. She is a self-employed contractor (Boel Hammarstrand's Trädvård (Sweden) and Swallows Tree Surgery (UK)), an NPTC trainer and assessor, a regular international climbing competitor and head judge of the UK 3ATC climbing competitions. Alternatively, how many female arborists have heard 'Surely you’re not going to be lifting/climbing/cutting that?!' Sometimes harassment and discrimination at work come from clientele and the wider community. Simply by association, it may alter their perceptions. I found my middle-year college placement quite tough; I had been accepted on the BTEC diploma course at Merrist Wood with previous experience in the nursery industry, combined with a short course in climbing, so my first year at college was a bit of a challenge. I hadn't really mastered climbing, needed to develop my skills further and often felt way behind the lads on my course.

Teachers love questions (and answers). Lisa Sanderson is a Training Developer and Lecturer for The Training Tree and an Arboricultural Consultant for Ian Keen Ltd. As if this isn't enough, Lesley is a working mother to two girls, wife to Tim, an active supporter of Fund4Trees (Ride for Research), and an avid forager, preserver and baker. Why are you an arborist? What attracted you to arboriculture?Consider also the sinister origins of the swing – an everyday object that symbolises carefree childhood games, but which apparently comes from the story of Erigone, who hanged herself in the pine tree under which her murdered father, Icarius, was buried. She cursed many young girls to be hanged in the tree until justice for her father was done. Her story was celebrated in the ‘Vintage Festival’, with offerings to Erigone and her Icarius, masks hanging from trees and girls on swings beneath the branches. In this story the tree becomes a weapon rather than another state of being. This story reminded me of writer Sue Townsend recounting how as an 8-year old girl she witnessed the brutal murder of a young girl whilst she was high up in the branches of a tree. She had hidden up there watching the girl die against the tree trunk, frozen with fear, before trying to alert an adult. As well as these ancient connections there’s also something sexual about women and trees. Could this be due to the phallic thrusting of a tree heavenwards, out of the earth? I remember the raped and subjugated women in post-war Germany and wonder if perhaps the photographer found it erotic seeing them straddling the branches. I read an article about a woman called Emma McCabe who apparently wants to marry a poplar tree she’s named Tim. In a possible manifestation of ‘dendrophilia’ (sexual attraction to trees) she is quoted as saying it’s ‘the best sex she’s ever had.’ Another woman flies to England from Canada every year to visit one particular tree she believes is her soul mate and that she feels she has an energetic connection with. Women have long protected trees, though not usually for romantic or sexual reasons. In the 1730s in India the Bishnoi women surrounded a group of trees to stop them being felled. Around 353 women were killed as a result of the protest. Women in Oaxaca, Mexico are ‘marrying’ trees as a symbolic gesture of mutual protection and to prevent illegal logging.

Statistics show women form a small percentage of the land-based workforce (ONS 2014). Some sectors (including forestry and fishing) have sample sizes of women workers too small for reliable estimates, 1 making it impossible to generate percentages for this article.In a photo from the first volume, a woman poses with a pillow propped behind her head, as if she’ll remain on her chosen branch so long she’ll end up napping there. Her expression is defiant and ambitious: a desire to push the limits, even if she is most likely setting herself up for a painful fall. For the brute truth about humans in trees is that we cannot last there; gravity will bring a person down eventually. Inherent in every escape into a tree is the pending question of descent and how much humility it will demand. “Being a woman has only bothered me in climbing trees,” declared Frances Perkins, the first female cabinet member in American history. Perkins served as FDR’s secretary of labor from 1933 to 1945, the same era as the women in the photographs.