Anna Burnside reviews ‘a deeply moving and lyrical performance’.
An elegy for a tree? Really? Yes indeed.
Folk musician Karine Polwart has based a deeply moving and lyrical performance on the celebration of a sabal palm that once dominated its glasshouse at Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden.
Accompanied by Dave Milligan on grand piano, standing before a spectacular feathery installation that gently suggests the tree, Polwart uses song, spoken word and poetry to tell the story of a species from Bermuda that became a fixture in Scotland for 200-odd years.
The story is partly personal: Polwart and her musical collaborator, Pippa Murphy, were artists-in-residence at the Botanics during lockdown. The palm was to come down as part of major improvements to the plant collection.
It had grown too big and unwieldy for the Victorian glasshouse—it bust out of the first version of the palm house within a few years. Latterly it was kept upright with an ingenious velcro collar, held in place by yacht rigging.
Polwart’s masterful storytelling takes in all the personal details of the gardeners and keepers who are personally invested in the tree without losing the political context of a species brought from Bermuda to entertain the novelty-crazed plant fanciers of the 1800s.
There’s even a twist at the end.
Every minute is a gentle delight.
Windblown performed at Queen’s Hall. Its run has ended.
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