A huge thank you to all the Tree Story tellers from the Carlow Garden Festival 2023 . These one minute Tree Stories from the Carlow Garden Festival range from simple heartfelt declarations for the natural world to historical stories from the 1700’s, from comical police searches for tree climbing gorillas to forest bathing
Mary Doyle was at the Garden Festival at Hardymount Gardens where she spoke about one of her Silver Birches falling in a recent storm .
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Mary’s words :
I love nature , I love the garden and what it gives us
and in the front we have three Silver Birch trees ,
on the right hand side of the drive and they are lovely and elegant .
You can see through the leaves , and they gently rustle and they are gorgeous .
The weather has been so bad , the rain that fell.
And out the window I saw the front silver birch moving really slowly and gently .
It was falling and it just gently fell, like a kind of a yawn
and collapsed down, came right across the two double drives.
It was a beautiful sight , we were very fortunate
it didn’t go out into the road kill passers by
or pedestrians or into our neighbours or into the wires or electrocute us all.
It was nothing dramatic , it was really gentle and lovely .
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Note:
The video length for the Memory Palace is restricted to one minute but occasionally some pairs of story tellers here have stories in two parts
The order of the following three dozen tree stories from the Carlow Garden Festival 2023 ( starting from video #44 ) on this webpage are roughly in alphabetical order of story tellers.
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Acknowledgments :
A huge thank you to the brilliant videographer Patrick Bramley for his unique combination of diligence and easygoing manner encouraging people to open up and share their Tree Story with us, to Eileen O ‘ Rourke of the Carlow Tourist office for the early stage brainstorming and the following support, to the Carlow Garden Trail and the participating venues listed here
An Gairdin Beo Community Garden ， Carlow
Duckett’s Grove , County Carlow
Altamont Gardens and Altamont Plant Sales, near Tullow/Ballon
Huntington Castle & Gardens, Clonegal
Arboretum Home & Garden Heaven, Leighlinbridge
Borris House Gardens and Woodland, Borris
Kilgraney House, Bagenalstown
Hardymount Gardens, Tullow
Also sincere thank you to Carlow County Council and Creative Ireland Carlow Funding without whose support the next three dozen Tree Stories on video would not have been possible.
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#1 Teardrops After a Storm
#2 Pomegranate Tree
#3 Trees are like Humans
#4 Old Ash – A Real Survivor
#5 Tree Rings of Life
#6 A Very Weird Elf
#7 Old Crabapple of Wenhua Dian
#8 Standing Fast
#9 Feeling Good – Tree Song
#10 Forest Breath – Tree Story
#11 Protective Peach – Tree Story
#12 Bee Tree (Part 1) Sycamore
#13 Winter Apples
#14 Ancient Yew Trees
#15 Once I Counted Birds
#16 Family Oak
#17 When the Trees Say Everything
#18 Strawberry Tree
#19 Mother Oak and Baby Oak
#20 My Leylandii
#21 Chestnut Repotted
#22 Native Birch
#23 Ethan’s Tree
#24 Holding Trunk of Time
#25 Our Mother’s Legacy
#26 It Blossomed
#27 Always Trying To Hold Each Other Up
#28 Wollemi Pine
#29 Barrow Willow
#30 For What We Might Become
#31 Sheltering Beech
#32 Millennium Monkey Puzzle
#33 Monterey Cyprus
#34 Struggle On, Struggle On
#35 Like A Chestnut
#36 Head and Shoulders Above
#37 An Dair Sean
#42 Unusual Bauhinia
# 46 Berna’s Umbrella Tree
#47 Hawthorne , it gives and it gives
#48 Apple Tree Swing
#49 Forest Bathing 1
#50 Forest Bathing 2
#51 Mulberry -when Swiss watches were almost made in Waterford
#52 Prunus Kanzan , double blossom Cherry blossom
#53 Oak We absolutely love it！
#54 Pre-Famine Timber
#55 Slogged Apples
#56 Ash Determined to stay put
#57 Best Apple Tart in Headford
#58 Apple Tree of Clonmel
#59 Horizontal Arbutus Unedo
#60 Euonymus Zones
#61 How big they can get
#62 Autumn Maple
#63 The Magic of Moss
#64 Gallipoli and the Sycamore
#65 Liquid Amber
#66 Hardmount Chestnut
#67 Silver Birch – a gentle lovely ending
#68 Keeping Black Bird Company
#69 Tulip Tree
#70 Itea Iliciafolia
#71 Silver Birch Moonlight
#72 The Shape of it
#73 The Missing Gorilla
#74 The Tree House
#75 Bat Burglars
#76 The Perfect Conker
#77 Ginkgo Biloba and Sweet Gum
#78 Ash The Horse Whisperer
#79 Healers
#80 Fairy Ash
# 86 Devine Tree of SanXingdui
#87 Chestnut of Xishan
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Open Call for your just a minute Tree Story on video
Memory Palace of Tree Stories is a socio-ecological art practice which invites you to tell a story or share information about trees . It is a creative-led social enquiry of how we can live well for both personal and collective wellbeing. Your story can be any kind of tree story , a personal tree story, an ecological tree story , an environmental tree story, an historical tree story or even a botanical tree story. I do hope you can contribute a comment on how we can live better with the greater community of life.
The year 2023 we continue to gather your stories in the form of one minute videos and we are really looking forward to hearing your tree story . I can be contacted directly on this platform or on the contact page on this website.
Niamh Cunningham