Some photographs are planned for weeks. Others happen in a heartbeat. But the images that have remained closest to me are almost always those of trees.

Over more than thirty years as an environmental photographer, I have stood beneath some of Britain’s oldest living organisms: ancient yews that may already have been growing while Stonehenge was being built; veteran beeches rooted in the Hampshire downlands travelled by William Cobbett; the legendary Major Oak of Sherwood Forest; and quiet crab apples on the Welsh borders that few people ever notice.

Each photograph has a story. This is mine.

Introduction

There are moments in a person’s life that stay with you for ever. For me, many of them have been spent standing beneath trees. Some are celebrated nationally; others grow quietly beside a track, a churchyard or a patch of common land. Their fame matters less than their presence. Each asks the same thing of us: slow down, look carefully and recognise that we are entering a story much older than our own.

Over the past thirty years, my work has taken me across Britain and beyond, photographing royal estates, agriculture, wildlife, rural communities and environmental projects. Yet, however far I travel, I keep returning to trees. They reward patience. A photograph made in hurried light may describe a trunk and canopy, but it rarely reveals the character of a tree or the landscape that formed it.

The work begins long before the camera leaves its bag: reading, talking to people who know the place, walking the ground and imagining how weather, season and light might come together. Sometimes it means returning at dawn after an evening reconnaissance. Sometimes it means waiting all day for the sun to fall low enough to reveal ancient bark. Sometimes it means driving home without exposing a frame. That is not failure. It is part of learning when a landscape is ready to be photographed.

Standing beneath them, camera in hand, you cannot help but feel like a visitor in their story rather than the other way around.

Witnesses to History

Trees occupy a unique place in the British landscape. Buildings can be rebuilt and roads diverted, but a living tree can remain rooted through centuries of change. Ancient oaks, beeches and yews have stood beside Roman routes, medieval churches, drovers’ tracks, village greens and country houses. They have watched farming evolve, species disappear, settlements grow, villages vanish and generations pass beneath their branches without moving an inch.

When I photograph an ancient tree, questions arrive almost unbidden. Who planted it, if anyone did? Who rested beneath it? What vows, bargains, prayers or everyday conversations took place within its shade? We cannot know most of the answers, yet the questions alter the way we see. The tree stops being scenery and becomes a living archive: biological, cultural and personal all at once.

That is why the phrase living heritage matters to me. Heritage is sometimes treated as something fixed behind glass. Trees are different. They grow, hollow, shed limbs, host fungi, feed insects and birds, and eventually die. Even then, standing deadwood can remain a rich habitat. Their history is not separate from their ecology; it is written through it.

The Queen’s Green Canopy

One of the greatest privileges of my career came when fellow photographer Adrian Houston and I photographed the nationwide network of seventy ancient trees and seventy ancient woodlands dedicated as part of The Queen’s Green Canopy. The project took us the length and breadth of the United Kingdom: to yews hidden in Welsh churchyards, mighty oaks in historic parkland, beeches clinging to chalk slopes and remote woods that have survived for centuries.

Every location demanded something different. We travelled thousands of miles, watched forecasts, returned for the right conditions and tried to make images worthy of places that had outlasted generations. The work was exhibited at Sotheby’s in London in December 2022, and the resulting book, The Queen’s Green Canopy: Ancient Woodlands and Trees, carries a foreword by His Majesty King Charles III.

The commission confirmed something I had felt for years: Britain’s ancient trees and woodlands are not decorative remnants. They are irreplaceable habitats and repositories of memory. Recording them was both a celebration and a reminder of responsibility. A photograph can invite attention, but conservation depends upon what people choose to value after they have looked.

Discover The Queen’s Green Canopy: Ancient Woodlands and Trees

Tŷ Canol Wood

If I had to name one place that has had the greatest effect on me, it would be Coed Tŷ Canol beneath Pentre Ifan in Pembrokeshire. I knew almost nothing about it before I arrived, which perhaps made the encounter more powerful.

The evening before my visit, I climbed to the higher ground above the wood to get my bearings. Sitting alone on a great pile of weathered rocks, I watched the sun descend towards Cardigan Bay. Its final orange rays caught only the upper canopy, setting the crowns of the oaks aglow like embers while the woodland floor disappeared into shadow. Before the sun had gone, I knew I would return before dawn to witness the sun rising through the wood at the start of a new day.

After staying locally at the Salutation Inn, I rose early and followed an old track into the wood, carrying camera and tripod. The atmosphere changed almost immediately. Gnarled sessile oaks grew among moss-covered rocks and old stone walls; trunks and branches carried ferns and a remarkable variety of lichens. Natural Resources Wales describes a landscape in which woodland cover has ebbed and flowed since the Ice Age, and which was already old when the nearby Pentre Ifan burial chamber was built around 5,500 years ago.

Everything seemed unusually vivid and clear. As I walked deeper, an overwhelming sense of peace settled over me. I slowed without meaning to and became reluctant to leave. Was it simply the filtered light from the rising sun, the dawn chorus and the saturated green colours of an exceptionally rich woodland? Did learning afterwards about hidden fungal relationships beneath the soil deepen the memory? Or was I responding to the palpable age of a landscape shaped by woodland, rock, grazing and human presence?

There is no need to force an explanation. Claims that the wood was a Druid sanctuary, or that fungal spores directly caused the feeling, go beyond what can be demonstrated. What can be said is that Tŷ Canol sits within an extraordinary prehistoric landscape. Pentre Ifan stands nearby, and the Preseli Hills beyond are connected with the bluestones taken to Stonehenge. In such a place, natural history and human imagination are inseparable.

Photographers often speak of chasing the light. At Tŷ Canol, the more important discovery was a sense of belonging within something larger: trees, rocks, lichens, history and morning light forming one living whole. I came away with photographs I valued, but also with a place that has never quite left me.

Llangernyw Yew

If one individual tree has left the deepest impression, it is the ancient yew in the churchyard of St Digain’s at Llangernyw, North Wales. Its exact age cannot be known. Estimates vary widely, and the Woodland Trust notes that claims of four or five thousand years are disputed. Even with that caution, it remains one of Wales’s oldest and most remarkable yews

I arrived before dawn. As the first light reached the churchyard, mist softened the gravestones and shafts of gold began to filter through the branches. The hollow, fragmented form of an ancient yew challenges ordinary ideas of a single trunk, yet the tree continues to live and renew itself. Standing beneath it, time felt less like a line than a great circle of loss, survival and regrowth.

A photograph can show scale, texture and light, but it struggles to convey presence. The most memorable part of that morning was not pressing the shutter. It was the quiet realisation that the people who built the church, tended the graves and walked through the village across many centuries had all known this same living landmark.

The Major Oak

I visited the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest in spring 2023. Its immense weathered trunk and supported limbs were clothed in fresh lime-green leaves. I arrived earlier in the day, but flat light made the scene feel merely descriptive, so I waited. Towards evening, warm sunlight filtered beneath the canopy and revealed the folds and fissures of the ancient bark.

The oak has long been woven into the Robin Hood legend. Whether every tale is history or folklore matters less than the way the tree entered the national imagination. People did not simply admire its size; they gave it stories, returned to it and recognised it as part of a shared landscape.

In June 2026, experts announced that the Major Oak had died after failing to come into leaf. Its ecological story is not over: deadwood can support fungi, insects, birds and other life for years. But the photograph I made now carries a poignancy I could not have anticipated, a spring evening when one of Britain’s best-known trees was still reaching into the light.

Photography cannot preserve a tree. It can, however, preserve a moment in our relationship with it, and remind us how quickly even seemingly permanent landmarks can pass from living presence into memory.

Watership Down Beeches

Some trees become woven into our personal geography. The veteran beeches on Watership Down stand along a route I know well when returning to my family home in the Hampshire chalk downlands. I have watched their delicate spring green deepen through summer, turn copper in autumn and finally give way to the strong architecture of winter branches.

I rarely pass without stopping. Their setting also brings to mind William Cobbett, one of my literary heroes. In Rural Rides, Cobbett recorded southern England with an observant, argumentative affection, travelling through the Hampshire countryside in the 1820s and staying at nearby Burghclere. I cannot prove that he passed beneath these particular trunks, but they belong to the same downland landscape he knew and described.

Cobbett understood that trees were never merely timber. They sheltered livestock, marked boundaries, shaped views and linked one generation with the next. The finest were gifts planted or protected by people who knew they might never see full maturity. Beneath the beeches, that long view feels immediate rather than abstract.

These are not only beautiful trees. They connect homecoming, literature, rural work and natural history. Each visit adds another layer to the same photograph in my mind, which is why I continue to return.

The Llanbister Crab Apple

Not every memorable tree has a famous name. I found a wild crab apple only a stone’s throw from our cottage, Ffos y Ffin, near Llanbister in Mid Wales. It stands at the edge of the common beside what appears to be an old route through the hills. Our cottage was once the village shop, serving local people and, very possibly, travellers moving livestock along the old roads.

Compared with an ancient yew or oak, the crab apple’s lifespan is modest. Yet fame and age are poor measures of value. In summer it offers shade; blossom feeds insects; autumn fruit becomes food for blackbirds, thrushes, fieldfares, mammals and other wildlife. It contributes quietly to the web of the common without attracting crowds or supports.

I photographed it on a cold November evening, silhouetting its crabby structure against the last warmth of the setting sun, over the damp, pastoral landscape. For a few minutes this scene seemed suspended between day and night.

What I love most is the tree’s modesty. It is useful, beautiful and familiar. Like an old friend, it is one of the landmarks that tells me I have arrived home. Living heritage does not exist only at nationally recognised sites; it grows beside us, often unnoticed, in the everyday countryside.

Why Trees Matter More Than Ever

Years spent photographing Britain’s trees have convinced me that they are far more than attractive features in a landscape. They are living archives and working ecosystems. Their roots hold soil; their leaves intercept rain and offer shade; their trunks and hollows provide habitat; their blossom and fruit feed other species. In towns and countryside alike, they can cool, shelter, store carbon and make places more liveable.

Their greatest lesson may be about time. We live by deadlines, financial years and election cycles. Trees ask us to think in decades and centuries. An oak planted now may achieve its fullest character long after the planter is gone. Protecting an old yew or restoring an ancient wood is therefore an act of faith in people we will never meet.

That perspective matters as the climate changes and biodiversity declines. Trees are not a single solution, and planting cannot substitute for protecting the complex habitats that already exist. Ancient woodland is irreplaceable: its soils, fungi, lichens, deadwood and continuity cannot be recreated quickly. Stewardship means caring for old trees, allowing younger generations to follow and making space for natural processes as well as planting well.

It also means valuing cultural memory. The Major Oak, Llangernyw Yew, Watership Down beeches and Llanbister crab apple matter in different ways, but each connects people with place. Stories encourage attention; attention can become affection; and affection is often where protection begins.

Perhaps that is why I keep photographing trees. Every image is a record of a living landscape at one moment in time. A photograph cannot save its subject, but it can preserve the memory of standing beneath it and sometimes inspire someone else to go, look and care.

Bringing Britain’s Living Heritage Into Your Home

Every print in my tree collection represents more than a beautiful view. Behind it lie journeys, research, waiting, changing weather and the effort to understand what a tree means within its landscape. My hope is that the finished photograph carries some of that encounter into the home: the stillness of dawn in a Welsh churchyard, evening light beneath a famous oak, or the familiar silhouette of a crab apple on the common.

I have often wondered why trees have become such a constant thread throughout my life as a photographer. Perhaps it is because they ask so little and give so much: shade to a shepherd, shelter to a bird, blossom to bees, fruit to autumn visitors, inspiration to artists and hope to those who follow.

Long after we have gone, many will still be here, quietly watching another generation pass beneath their branches. If my photographs encourage even a few people to pause, look more closely and seek out these remarkable places for themselves, they will have achieved everything I could hope for.

Explore the complete Tree Prints Collection and discover photographs made among Britain’s ancient trees, veteran woodlands and quieter rural landmarks.

A photograph can never fully reproduce the experience of standing beneath a tree that has witnessed centuries of British history. But perhaps it can inspire the journey.