Since the last entry have been cracking on with work both at home, here in the Exe estuary and in Coventry as part of City of Culture. Here are a few things that have been happening. Please get in touch if you want to find out more.

After many years carefully midwifing Walking Forest with Shelley Castle, Lucy Neal and Ruth Ben-Tovim our commission for Coventry City of Culture 2021 part funded by Season for Change enabled us to bring our vision to life in across the city with a multitude of participants.  In particular, we worked with a cohort of 20 anchor women who co-designed a two day performance action with us after a three day woodland camp on the edge of the city. The ritual/performance involved carrying a felled birch tree from HS2 high speed rail link, through the city over two days, dawn until dusk with pop-up events, meals and performances. You can watch a video about the event here. We then went up to Glasgow for the Cop26 climate talks with the tree and participants from Coventry and forged a wonderful connection with GalGael who now have one of the tree limbs to be crafted into vessels and instruments of mourning. Special moments included gifting seeds to delegates from the Climate Vulnerable Forum. Over the next three years we will  be  working with UK treescapes as part of the interdisciplinary research project MEMBRA looking at treescapes, carbon and memory.

A Tidelines highlight was A Body of Water, a creative lab on Water Quality and Monitoring on the Exe estuary and coast where 19 people from the local community, researchers and organisations gathered together for a day to share different perspectives and generate ideas for working together to improve water quality. RSPB, Westcountry Rivers Trust, University of Exeter, Marine Biological Association and South West Water were amongst the organisations present along with audio visual artist Kathy Hinde and visual artist Shelley Castle. This event was funded by East Devon Council and the Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter.

We now have a Body of Water working group and also are starting citizen science swim research working with bioaccoustic researcher Sophie Nedelec.

Lots of other bits and bobs including talks for Glasgow School of Art, Grays’ Aberdeen and Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) and University of Exeter. Lots to report next time on Fruit Routes which is now in its 10^th year. Look out for Fruit Routes in the Institute of Advanced Studies’ Transitions Festival in May. We also finally got to wassail our trees again on FLOW. What a relief and a joy. Byee!