Location: Glasgow, Scotland, UK
Credit: Colin Thomson
Initiative: NERC/UKRI Changing the Environment Programme: Glasgow as a Living Laboratory Accelerating Novel Transformation (GALLANT) (NERC/ UKRI)
Project: communiMap
Story: In Elder Park, Govan, Glasgow, two members of the tree-mapping group, Colin and Marie, peer out from gaps in the deeply split trunk of a hawthorn the group recently logged on the communiMap app. The tree’s record lists a circumference of 96cm measured with a tape measure, partial shade, and signs of fungi, lichens, and other invertebrates living in and around it. Colin’s own note on the record describes a tree that survived a significant bend in its main stem by extending a large branch from its upper crown to rebalance itself, with a split in the trunk deep enough to see right through, what he calls being ‘well adapted to its vulnerability.’
This photograph sits at the point where the playful and the systematic meet. The same tree that prompted careful, structured documentation, species, measurements, ground conditions, and observed wildlife, is also a tree two people couldn’t resist climbing into and peering out of, treating a gap in its bark as something to explore rather than just record. Both responses come from the same close attention: you don’t notice a trunk is hollow enough to see through, or sturdy enough to play in, without first looking properly.
It’s also simply the photo this community wanted shared. Offered by Colin as one of the funnier moments from the group’s work in Elder Park, it captures something the measurements alone can’t: that, alongside its scientific value, this has become a genuinely enjoyed, shared activity for the people doing it.