Author, artist, and creative entrepreneur Louise Wannier shares how photography led her to write a children’s book about tree spirits.
My years behind the camera taught me to notice the quiet details in things I saw around me—light, texture, emotion. When I started taking photographs it was a way for me to try to capture what, for me, feels like the spirit of what I am seeing.
I remember the first time I saw a tree spirit. It was in the front park along the road leading up to my primary school in Twickenham, Chase Bridge, a neighborhood south of the River Thames near London. I remember we were still allowed then to play with what we called conkers on a string, a simple game of tying chestnuts on a piece of old yarn. I remember quite vividly looking up at this huge, old oak tree and seeing my first tree spirit. This one was, or felt to me, to be a grand lion watching from its branches.