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Email-a-Tree Service Doesn’t Go As Planned in the Best Possible Way - The Atlantic

Melbourne gave their trees ID numbers and email addresses so residents could report downed branches or other problems. Instead, people starting writing their trees love letters. 

Sometimes, the trees even write back: 

To: Green Leaf Elm, Tree ID 1022165   29 May 2015   Dear Green Leaf Elm, I hope you like living at St. Mary’s. Most of the time I like it too. I have exams coming up and I should be busy studying. You do not have exams because you are a tree. I don’t think that there is much more to talk about as we don’t have a lot in common, you being a tree and such. But I’m glad we’re in this together. Cheers, F”

29 May 2015  Hello F, I do like living here. I hope you do well in your exams. Research has shown that nature can influence the way people learn in a positive way, so I hope I inspire your learning. Best wishes, Green Leaf Elm, Tree ID 1022165

I am so completely charmed by this. 

or: a few of my favourite poems about dying, being dead, & the ones who are left behind. some melancholic, some upbeat, some morbid, some euphemistic, some sombre, some tongue-in-cheek, some direct, some not, all good. in no particular order:

“on death, without exaggeration“, wisława szymborska (oh, it has its triumphs, / but look at its countless defeats, / missed blows, / and repeat attempts!)

“the suicide’s room”, wisława szymborska (a lamp, good for fighting the dark / a desk, and on the desk a wallet, some newspapers / carefree buddha and a worried christ / seven lucky elephants, a notebook in a drawer.)

“the letters of the dead”, wisława szymborska (poor dead, blindfolded dead, / gullible, fallible, pathetically prudent.)

(can you see that i’m very fond of wisława szymborska?)

“harlod’s leap”, stevie smith (it may have killed you / but it was a brave thing to do.)

“not waving but drowning”, stevie smith (i was much further out than you thought / and not waving but drowning)

“a meeting”, wendell berry (he has, / i know, gone long and far, / and yet he is the same / for the dead are changeless.)

“the dead”, billy collins (the dead are always looking down on us, they say)

“memory”, hayden carruth (my dear, / how could you have let this happen to you?)

“her long illness”, donald hall (daybreak until nightfall, / he sat by his wife at the hospital / while chemotherapy dripped / through the catheter into her heart.)

“this is a photograph of me”, margaret atwood (the photograph was taken / the day after i drowned.)

“owl song”, margaret atwood (i do not want revenge, i do not want expiation, / i only want to ask someone / how i was lost, / how i was lost)

“anne sexton’s last letter to god”, tracey herd (i have just lunched with an old friend / saying goodbye and something / ‘she couldn’t quite catch’.)

“ophelia’s confession”, tracey herd (i didn’t drown by accident. it was a suicide. / at least let me call my mind my own / even when my heart was gone beyond recall.)

“the promise”, marie howe (he looked at me as though he couldn’t speak, as if / there were a law against it, a membrane he couldn’t break.)

“aubade”, philip larkin (being brave / lets no one off the grave. / death is no different whined at than withstood.)

“lady lazarus”, sylvia plath (and i a smiling woman. / i am only thirty. / and like the cat i have nine times to die.)

“edge”, sylvia plath (her bare / feet seem to be saying: / we have come so far, it is over.)

“sylvia’s death”, anne sexton (what is your death / but an old belonging, / a mole that fell out / of one of your poems?)

“a curse against elegies”, anne sexton (also, i am tired of all the dead. / they refuse to listen)

“tomorrow they’ll cut me open”, anna swir (i have many powers in me. i can live, / i can run, dance and sing. / all of that is in me, but if need be, / i’ll walk away.)

“biology teacher”, zbigniew herbert (in the second year of the war / our biology teacher was killed / by history’s schoolyard bullies)

“dedication”, czesław miłosz (you whom i could not save / listen to me.)

“dirge without music”, edna st. vincent millay (they are gone. / they are gone to feed the roses.)

the rosie probert scene in “under milk wood”, dylan thomas (remember her. / she is forgetting. / the earth which filled her mouth / is vanishing from her.)

“do not go gentle into that good night”, dylan thomas (old age should burn and rave at close of day; / rage, rage against the dying of the light)

“a quoi bon dire?”, charlotte mew (and everybody thinks that you are dead, / but i.)

“myth”, natasha trethewey (you’ll be dead again tomorrow, / but in dreams you live. so i try taking / you back into morning.)

“i watched you disappear”, anya krugovoy silver (are you there? where? / are the others there, too?)

“i am asking you to come back home”, jo carson (my mamma used to say she could feel herself / runnin’ short of the breath of life. so can i. / and i am blessed tired of buryin’ things i love.)

“the night where you no longer live”, meghan o’rourke (was there gas station food / and was it a long trip)

“condolence”, dorothy parker (but i had smiled to think how you, the dead, / so curiously preoccupied and grave, / would laugh, could you have heard the things they said.)

“death at daybreak”, anne reeve aldrich (i shall pass dawn on her way to earth, / as i seek for a path through space.)

“fear no more the heat o’ the sun”, william shakespeare (golden lads and girls all must, / as chimney-sweepers, come to dust.)

“sonnet xciv”, pablo neruda (don’t call up my person. i am absent. / live in my absence as if in a house.)

“funeral blues”, w. h. auden (the stars are not wanted now; put out every one, / pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, / pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood)

“the drowned children”, louise glück (but death must come to them differently, / so close to the beginning.)

fleabag confessional scene → requested by @viseriyen

turns out all the sonnets are really gay but here is my list of the absolute gayest ones, because i was not prepared for how explicit these were going to be and it devastated me 

sonnet 20 - this is the ‘master-mistress of my passion’ one

sonnet 22 - ‘Presume not on thy heart when mine is slain; / Thou gav’st me thine, not to give back again.’

sonnet 23 - acting metaphors! the difficulty of expressing verbally what silent love hath writ! gazing at your love with your whole heart in your eyes!

sonnet 25 - rich and noble people have joy in honour and wealth and so on but turns out having joy in being gay is way better than that - ‘Then happy I, that love and am beloved / Where I may not remove nor be removed.’

sonnet 26 - begins ‘Lord of my love’ and just gets gayer from there

sonnet 27 - for those nights when u can’t sleep for staying up pining and thinking about him

sonnet 41 - this one’s sad bc his boyfriend is Straying but also love btw a man and woman is explicitly directly made analogous to the love between the speaker and the addressee so like. stop no-homoing the sonnets

sonnet 53 - compare ur bf to both helen and adonis, no big deal

sonnet 57 - this love is the speaker’s WHOLE LIFE and he knows he’s a fool for his bf but he can’t help it

sonnet 61 - another too-gay-to-sleep one

sonnet 71 and sonnet 72 - don’t be sad for me when i’m dead, i’d rather be forgotten by you than have you be sad or be exposed to ridicule over your love for me - please read these ones they make me cry

sonnet 80 - RIVAL POET someone else is writing fancier poems about you!! now what!!

sonnet 87 - ‘Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,’ aka If You Love Someone Let Him Go (sad)

sonnet 91 - i’m not rich or noble but at least i’m not straight, mark two - ‘Thy love is better than high birth to me, / Richer than wealth, prouder than garments’ cost, / Of more delight than hawks or horses be; / And having thee, of all men’s pride I boast’

sonnet 93 - ‘So shall I live, supposing thou art true, / Like a deceived husband’ - just comparing yourself to his HUSBAND. bye

Came across such an interesting essay in Virginia Woolf & The Natural World called:

Which basically traces the recurrent theme of flowers in Woolf’s work and analyses their meaning in each of her novels. There’s also a few bar-charts which are so delightful.