Twigs, leaves and signing up . . .

You can find them everywhere, stormtrees. I’ve loved them as long as I can remember. I started off with those leaning thorns you get on cliff top walks at Whitby and Scarborough. Stunted and twisted and trimmed by the prevailing wind into dense, angled Northern bonsai.

Then there’s the hedgerow type: once laid by a harsh and accurate billhook to form a living fence. One such bent bough made a grand reading den in Wakefield for a strange lass full of imagination and short on commonsense. My mother was not impressed by the green mould stains on my frocks.

Who remembers The Lightning Tree? The line ‘Never too late for you and me’ still runs through my head. That’s what Stormtree Press is about . The current term is resilience.

Wherever you find those tough specimens, rough-barked and gnarled of root, they are patron saints of survival. There ought to be hagiographies of these venerable beings. Their growth can be small but it is strong. A hag’s nest of twigs or a faint green halo of minute leaves show life still runs in the sap.

The first Bookling is sprouting from our rootstock. A little slow, the texture not quite as anticipated, yet it grows. Thank you for being sun, rain and wind to it.

If you would like a free copy of the first Stormtree Bookling, please sign up to this blog for future notices.