I spent an hour playing my leaf guitar for my favorite boxwood grove & then when I got home I hooked it up to some contact mics & set it on fire.

It saddens me that the ruins have no mention of the lives of the people who built the mansion & planted its gardens, but the boxwoods remember it all.

As far as historical context for the site goes I give the ruins an F. Theres not one mention of the people who were enslaved on its grounds & tended the gardens.

For this location I recorded several of the largest boxwoods I could find then I collected leaves & stuffed my guitar full of them.

I spent the week hanging around the historic boxwoods at the ruins in Barboursville VA, a tree Im very familiar with, working as a gardener for years pruning boxwoods like these for wealthy clients at historic homes in the area. The mansion was designed by Jefferson in 1814 for gov Barbour.

@democracynow is the best climate/COP coverage in the US. More AI means more pipelines and global heating. It is a scheme by the Fossil Fuel industry to force a market for the fracked gas no one outside the US wants.

ICCI using the sound of calving glaciers during their presentation
🔥🌍🔥

It’s hard to know exactly how old this tree is but it is fair to say that it likely witnessed this landscape before the civil war when the region was among the oldest and fiercest of the American Slavocracy, on through to the modern era, when woodland trails were abandoned for car infrastructure.

My friend Roger who passed away in 2019 took me to see this tree almost a decade ago. Roger was a true keeper of local history and folklore in his section of the Northern Neck and told me he understood this marking to be the last survivor of five beech trees used as trail markers through the woods.