Location: Glasgow, Scotland, UK
Credit: Sarah Gambell
Initiative: NERC Changing the Environment (Glasgow as a Living Laboratory Accelerating Novel Transformation) (UKRI-NERC)
Project: communiMap
Story: This photograph was taken on a rainy day in mid-April, when David Treanor’s planned outdoor tree session in Elder Park got rained off and the group adapted rather than cancelled. People had already gathered daffodils, cherry blossom, magnolia and pine cuttings outdoors, and the morning turned, back in Elder Park Library, into a close study of flowers themselves: what petals are actually for, the patterns on them that guide insects toward the pollen at the centre, and the less celebrated blossoms that get overshadowed every spring by show-stopping cherry trees.
Treanor is a Glasgow arborist who has cared for the city’s Argyle Street Ash for several years and nominated it for the Woodland Trust’s UK Tree of the Year award, which it won in 2025. That day, he used a sycamore that had visibly burst into leaf in the space of a single week as a live example of how fast change happens once you’re paying attention, the same principle this whole project is built on. The group also talked through why trees carry the botanical names they do, and the layered, sometimes uncertain reasons a tree is lost, what Treanor called tree forensics.
People who’d collected their own flowers that morning stood up afterwards to talk about what they’d found, several later said how much they’d enjoyed finding the nerve to speak. None of this produces a single tidy result the way a measurement does, but it builds exactly the kind of attentiveness and confidence this project depends on. At the time, the group had mapped just under 300 trees in Elder Park, a number that would keep climbing through the rest of that year.