Behind the Design

“Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.”

“Let me look upward into the branches of the flowering oak and know that it grew great and strong because it grew slowly and well.”

“The ash tree, called uinnseann in gaelic, has strong links in with the Vikings, but also has its place in British folklore.”

“Rosewood has always been one of my favourite scents.”

“The tree I had in the garden as a child, my beech tree, I used to climb up there and spend hours. I took my homework up there, my books, I went up there if I was sad, and it just felt very good to be up there among the green leaves and the birds and the sky.”

“The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain - a magic wand in Nature’s hand - every devout mountaineer knows its power.”

“[Teak] is generally an enormous tree, measuring often in height some fifty to sixty feet, and in girth as much as twelve to fifteen or sixteen feet. It is wood that takes a comparatively short time to season, and it is used enormously by the Burmese for their carvings. In fact, everything practically that is not built of bamboo or brick in Burma, is built of teak wood.”

“They settled in, and later in the day, Elsa took Dolly for a walk through the rubber trees. Each tree had a diagonal slash across its trunk, with a halved coconut shell cupped underneath. Elsa swirled her forefinger through one of these cups and dug out a hardened crescent of latex. “They call these cup-lumps,” Elsa said, handing the latex to Dolly. Dolly raised the spongy gray lump to her nose: the smell was sour and faintly rancid. She dropped it back into the coconut-shell cup.”