MAY 2025 · GROUNDED
Mid Wales Woodland
Radnor Forest, Powys
I grew up around Nash Wood. It sits inside the larger Radnor Forest plantation, a block of birch and bracken on the edge of the fir. I've been in and out of it since I was a child, which means I've stopped seeing it clearly for most of my life.
I went back in December, the right season for birch woodland. When the bracken has rusted down and the deciduous trees have dropped their leaves, the white bark becomes the subject. You stop looking at the wood as a whole and start looking at individual trunks.
When the bracken has rusted down and the deciduous trees have dropped their leaves, the white bark becomes the subject.
Nash Wood — May 2025
The birches are lichen-covered, most of them. Grey-green patches on white bark, the texture almost geological up close. The trunks curve as they grow — none of them straight, all of them working around each other and around the light. At the edge of the birch stand, where the plantation starts, the dark conifers sit in the background of every frame. They change what the birches look like. The contrast between the white bark and the dark mass behind it is what gives these photographs their particular weight.
The understory in December is almost nothing — just bracken and leaf litter, rust-coloured, lying flat. A curved white trunk rises through it, perfectly isolated. Three trunks together, lichen on all of them, minimal vegetation at their base.
Then the wider landscape. Winter fog filling the Radnor hills, a sunlit hillside in the foreground with sheep on it.
Further out still: a solitary conifer and two telegraph poles on a bare slope, the sky grey behind them. That frame is black and white and looks like it was made in a different decade. The telegraph poles are the most contemporary thing in it. The rest could be any winter in the last hundred years.
Moss-covered birch trunks rising through dead bracken and leaf litter in winter woodland, Nash Wood Radnor Forest
Curved white birch trunk emerging from rust-brown winter bracken, dark conifers in background
Three lichen-encrusted birch trunks in winter, Nash Wood Radnor Forest, minimal understory vegetation
Silver birch trees at woodland edge with white bark, rust-coloured bracken, conifer plantation behind
Twisted white birch trunk in winter bracken and scrub, dark conifer forest looming behind
Winter fog filling Radnor hills, sunlit green hillside and sheep grazing in foreground, Powys
Solitary dark conifer and two telegraph poles on bare hillside slope against grey sky, black and white