Planting by the book – after John Stirling-Maxwell – consists of a portfolio, a photograph and a chart of full stops extracted from three texts on trees. The work is intended as a proposition for the positioning and planting of trees in the landscape. It is a response to Sir John Stirling Maxwell’s passion for forestry and the influence, to this day, of his knowledge of tree planting: some of it tested by him on his country estate at Corrour on the edge of Loch Ossian. In this version, however, it becomes a schema for the placement of a group of jet spheres on the lawn at the back of Pollok House – jet, like coal, being wood in a fossilized form.

The texts from which the proposed planting pattern is formed are as follows:
Robert Graves, ‘The Tree Alphabet’ in The White Goddess
Fiona Stafford, ‘Buds, Bark and a Golden Bough’ in The Long, Long Life of Trees
Jim Crumley, ‘The Great Woods’ in his book The Great Wood on Scotland’s Woodlands.