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The Weather Tree |
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About me
We have had an agricultural consultancy business here for nearly 30 years. My own work centres on the natural world and my garden and is influenced by my background as a zoologist and keen naturalist. My studio is open once a year under the North Yorkshire Open Studios scheme - www.dathelwallart.com. As with many country people the weather is a constant preoccupation and I watch for the many changes it brings to my garden, the vegetables we grow and the wider natural world. I am also keenly aware of the affect it has on how we view life and how it moulds the English character. The idea for the Weather Tree came from an account of Chinese family life written by an American woman staying with a Chinese family in 1920. (Waln, Nora. The House of Exile. Reprinted and available from Amazon). She recalls helping the lady of the house prepare paints for use in the "Chart of the Lessening of the Cold". This was an annual record kept as an aid to garden and farm work.
A companion scroll recorded the harvest for the corresponding summer and autumn so that the effect of the winter weather on crops could be seen at a glance. Scrolls recording the weather in this form had been kept continuously in this family for twenty-two generations and were stored in a pair of cabinets of black wood carved with garden and farm scenes. Whether the keeping of such records was a widespread practice or peculiar to this one household is not known. |
I
am Dorothy Thelwall an artist living with my husband in a beautiful village
in North Yorkshire. 
Each year she painted a plum tree
on a silk scroll, giving it nine branches and each branch nine twigs. The tree was
decorated with leaf buds in brown, green and silver and the shadow of a pink blossom was
painted on each of the eighty-one twigs. After the winter solstice one blossom was painted
each day according to the weather.