Arborglyphs of Pollok Park

by Ross Samson

SUSAN I LOVE YOU

This is my second favourite arborglyph in Pollok Park. Arbor, meaning “tree” and glyph, meaning “writing”, gives us, well, tree graffiti (graffiti means “that which was written” and shares its root name with graphite). There is surprisingly little engraving on trees that is non-literal. Hearts and arrows, that’s about it for engraved art.
We have to assume that carving on trees has been something humans have always done. Over 30,000 years ago humans were sculpting and painting animals on cave walls. We have carvings on bone almost as old. Wood is softer and thus an obvious medium. But wood decays quickly, so the evidence rarely survives. Literate societies have always inscribed casually on stone and metal. The Neolithic tomb Maes Howe in Orkney has Viking runic inscriptions that tell how the band sheltered there from a storm. If that was meant to excuse their trespass, one of the party let them all down by recounting how Ingeborg had given him great pleasure in Bergen.

The trees of Pollok speak less colourfully. Most “messages” are terse to the point of being almost purely symbolic and are restricted primarily to the existential sentiments: “I am” and “I love”. Thus JC on its own (and there are quite a few JCs in the park) and JC + AC respectively record the existence of J.C. and the love of J.C. and A.C. for each other. J.C. is unlikely to have been Jesus Christ or Julius Caesar or Jeremy Corbyn, but I wouldn’t bet against James or John Campbell (three of the commonest names of Scottish men for half a millennium). It reveals the power of convention that so many people in the park made the existential claim “I exist” without telling us more explicitly who they were! GEO left his (I guess) mark on at least three trees, each one bigger than the last (from large to huge).

But are the letters short for George (as I guess) or are they initials? And who is R who left the lone letter looking more like logo?
   There is something almost universally human about the compulsion to say “I woz ‘ere”. Something a bit sad too, as if even a scarcely literate ned recognises that we all strut our hour upon the stage but that our sound and fury signify nothing. THoMAS has left behind a little reminder that he once was. Here’s to you, Tom. And here's to you, too, Dee, Dan, Lucy, Derek, Jack, Baz, Sean, Rami, Ryan, Andy, Tim, Fanny and Howie
   Alongside the quiet desperation of the lone carver, there are many "gangs" who recorded their outing to Pollok estate, such as M.M., B.T. and J.C. Unlike the Vikings in Orkney, however, they never expound on the circumstances of their expedition. Wouldn’t it be great if, in the smallest of engraving, we found “The cold bites my hands. I am warmed by the thought of mince and tatties at hame.”
   The common triple and quadrupel sets of initials appear to belong to what is better described as pals than a gang. BOAB, ANDY, STU, DJ were surely no gang. The lead two carved with exemplary typefaces. The small raised O in BOAB is almost Macintosh in inspiration. They even left an arrow to show the direction their expedition travelled, perhaps in case search parties were required.

Even the tribal nature of football graffiti is largely absent from Pollok’s trees. One incidence of MUFC does make me laugh. It is completely hidden deep in an unfrequented patch of wood. It is as if the carver feared being discovered or even his carving being seen. Like a secret votive offering, it was enough that Football God saw his devotion and would thus bless Man U with an injury-time goal the following week.

Love Actually

The bulk of tree graffiti is little more than “X loves Y”. LVS can be found. And this can be shortened further to just L. And let’s face it, a far stronger case can be made for the advantage of abbreviation when carving than when texting! The influence of texting can also be seen in Kel 4 Sam. But “love” is more often denoted by a simple plus sign. The + supposes love on both sides and not a one-way longing. It is also much easier and quicker to carve. But how often was the engraving truly mutual, done with both parties present? If the announcement of mutual attraction was made by only one party, was the engraving ever revealed to the other? Was the reveal a special occasion?
That the pairing was announced publicly by arboreal display is beyond doubt. The vast bulk of proclamations of love are to be found on trees along public paths and on the visible side of the tree. As one 16-year old put it to me, “Urgh, how primitive: updating your status on a tree.” Possibly true. But how much less cruel to be dumped by tree than by tweet?
Yes, a few inscriptions in Pollok Park suggest the break-up of couples through the removal of one set of initials. SC+CW is the saddest.

SC4CW is on the next tree with a neighbouring third tree simply recording the two pairs of intials. All have a cross through the initials. A fair guess is that the jilted party removed the other person’s initials or, in the case of SC and CW, did the crossing out. But how many couples remained together ever after? It would be great to hear if JC + AC got married and became, well, JC + AC. Or did those true romantics carve their initials after marriage?

The oldest I have found is DIANA + MORRIS = LOVE 1958 (it could be 1950). Are you the daughter or son of Diana and Morris? Or the grandchild? Are granny Diana and granpa Morris almost 80 years old? It could be them who carved their names on that tree.

Disrespect Actually

The positivity of the messages borne in tree carvings is notable. Love, the proclamation of existence, pride in group cohesion or football allegiance, these contrast with the rarity of negative invocations. Romano-Britons often wrote notes to various gods saying things like “please help me find my cloak and I’ll give your temple sixpence” or “make X suffer ever more from constipation for stealing my girlfriend”. It amuses me how specific and mundane the requests were and how the curses were fairly gentle. The tree engravers of Pollok Park, on the other hand, were rarely even mildly belligerent.

   GUS IS A . . . leaves us guessing now, although I am sure it was originally meant to be quite clear. Below it but well off centre is what I mistook for TA and this confused me. But the actual lettering is FT and an A. The carving of FT is different and surely unrelated. The A seems random. BENT has been engraved in the crampt remaining space so it is not neatly centred as all the text above it is. And it is smaller and it is not parallel. In other words, it is a poor match the start of the inscription. It looks like an afterthought or was it added by another or was the engraver simply careless in planning. Whatever the answer, “Gus is a bent” is pretty poor.
  On the back of the tree at the same height as GUS and in a similar size and style of carving is MENTAL. The full carved message might thus read “Gus is a mental” (or bent mental) with the punchline only being revealed as you walk around the tree. Nice touch!
   The invection against Gus is today far less apparent because of the addition of other graffiti to the tree. When I first saw MENTAL I also noted FAT to the left of it and just above. The words don’t align properly and later I realised that the two were unrelated. Just below FAT is COW. And FAT COW appears in three other inscriptions. But it appears in the nominative case as the subject, as if this were someone’s nickname. Just once is there more to the inscription: FAT COW IS A . . . . The inscriber may have realised that “Fat Cow is a fat cow” is faintly ridiculous and stopped, but there does seem to be more to the inscription. However, it is so obscured by the tree's growth that nothing is legible. It is almost as if Pollok’s trees have cast a spell on those who have tried to be vicious and vindictive with their arborglyphs, rendering them incoherent or illegible.
   And this extends to an almost total absence of other political, racist or sectarian messages engraved arborally. I have found IRA engraved on two trees (one is amongst the most secluded inscriptions I have found) and 1690 (the date of the Battle of the Boyne) on two trees. Tims 2, Proddies 2: a scored draw.

HELLO MY FRIEND

Hello, indeed. A few people have told me that they find this message creepy. But that says a lot about them! The tree also has HELLO ACE scratched faintly on it. Given the general warmth and friendliness of tree engravings, I can only read this as meant pleasantly, although slightly surreal.
Nothing beats the large and deep inscription SEX for surreality. It does, however, sum up much of teenage preoccupation in general (does it belie the youth of the inscriber that it is not followed with "PLEASE") and, presumably, what lies behind much of the intention of arborglyphs in particular.

Well, perhaps not the Christian tree grafitti that I have encountered. The absolutely oddest engraving I have seen is an alpha and omega, the first and last letter of the Greek alphabet and amongst the earliest symbols of Christianity. It is one of the largest and deepest and newest carvings I have seen at Pollok Park, and quite easily the most beautiful, executed with loving care. The Christian tagger has not stopped there. His or her signature is the Maltese Cross. One tree bears a large version. The tagger's initials are decorated with two tiny versions. So look out M, your identity will not remain undiscovered for long! Perhaps you could let me know if the infinity symbol is also yours.

Which trees, when?

Beech is the most common tree to be engraved in Pollok Park. But it is also one of the most common trees in the park. Silver birch, ash, sycamore and horse chesnut are also engraved. Whatever the species, it is clearly smooth bark that attracts the engraver. Trees with rough bark like Scots pine and oak require much more effort to clear a “ground” on which carvings will stand out clearly. I have seen but a single tiny engraving on juniper.
The trees chosen are usually medium sized. Small trees have small diameters. This creates a more curved surface on which to engrave, which necessitates a smaller carving. Even a short message would wrap around the trunk of a 20-year old beech and require the reader to walk around it. But once a beech tree is really mature, the bark at the base of the tree becomes much rougher and more like other trees, and not so easy to engrave. So “teen-aged” trees are ideal. There are two consequences of carving on these teenagers which have only limited future vertical growth of the tree. Engraving at shoulder height is probably easiest for the carver and is readily visible to passers-by. But at four or five feet from the ground, this portion of the tree will scarcely grow another foot vertically even after 40 years. By contrast, after 40 years a beech tree can put on a lot of girth, as indeed do many photographers!
This increase in girth means that carved glyphs do not stretch vertically over time but do become much wider. This is particularly obvious when you observe the vertical and horizontal strokes of letters carved a long time ago. The upright verticals of an H or E can be very wide while the horizontals are little more than a knife’s width. This gives the archaeologist a rough method of dating their age. The fact that a carver often dates the inscription means there is a precise method of dating some and by looking at these we can get a feel for how “fat” glyphs become over time. Similarly aged engravings on different trees will still show some differences for the girth of the trees will not have grown by the same amount given all sorts of factors (age of tree, competition by neighbouring trees, quality of soil and amount of light, trauma due to wind, lightening or pest damage, etc.) not to mention the carvers’ varying techniques.

Tree harming or hugging?

Before I even looked online, I imagined finding tirades against present and future arborglyphs. And, sure enough, there they are. Many offer dire (and hugely exaggerated) warnings about the danger carving poses to the health of trees. Here I should note that I have not seen a single sign of infection at any engraving on any tree in Pollok Park and along obvious avenues the only missing trees have died of old age. The only serious manmade damage I have seen to a tree in the distant past was caused by barbed wire, still sticking from the wound 30 years later. One sensible website admits that tough old beech trees can easily handle a few initials. But it suggests that carvings make trees ugly and that these scars never disappear. It suggests that paint or indelible markers are better. They cause no danger to the trees and will eventually wear off. What piffle! Spray paint on trees is far uglier than carvings. And there is a cultural gulf between the spray painter and the engraver.

   When talking to people about tree carvings, many a conservative old biddy (like my mother) decried it instantly. “They should be locked up!” The perpetrators are dismissed as vandals who commit crimes, crimes of tree distressing. Perhaps crimes of being naughty? It causes momentary confusion when I show them some of the recent Christian carvings in Pollok Park. Damn those Christians and their ungodly behaviour. Throw them to the lions!
  In my opinion, the sheer effort required to create a quiet message carved on a tree means that the carver must have a degree of integrity. The spray painter, on the other hand, knocks out a large inelegant message in moments and is having a laugh. One such character spray painted the word SUSAN, in silver, on a tree with an arrow underneath it pointing right. Was Susan's paramour pointing her to their tryst or was a psycho admitting to where he had buried Susan's body? A short distance down a path revealed another, then another silver arrow until the word SUSAN appeared again on another tree, this time with an arrow pointing down. It pointed at a big spray-painted silver cock. I doubt this Susan would have found as much happiness with her admirer with a spray can as the earlier Susan might have done with her admirer with a penknife.
   No one who carves on a tree thinks their actions will kill or seriously harm the tree. The point of carving on a tree is that it will be seen for years to come. And to be seen, the viewer has to come to the tree. In short, there is a bond with that tree. My wife knows roughly were a tree stands with her intials carved by a teenage boy. Do you have a tree etched in your memory? Is it a tree etched with a memory of you? I could possibly lead you to a tree I was stuck in for several hours at a height of 50 feet when I was nine. But I don’t think of it as mine. I don't think of it fondly. Carving on a tree may not be the same as hugging a tree. But, then, hugging a tree does seem like little more than a piece of harmless, but also pointless madness.