Cherry Tree Sap

When resourcefulness brings you into being.

I’m broke. I didn’t have enough money to buy Gum Arabic, a natural gum produced by the Acacia tree predominately in Senegal. I usually use it as a binder for the natural inks I make with plants, food scraps and pantry items. I was running an art workshop on Saturday 16th with the charity May Project Gardens so I needed to find a solution. I look up on Google “Gum Arabic alternatives”, “how to make Gum Arabic at home”. I come across an article listing alternative trees and there it is. Cherry Tree. I run to the garden…

It was always there, I had no idea. I’m circling the tree looking at its folds and crevices, a lover showing their beauty spots and scars. Look here, it’s sweet here, you can take some, but not all of it. I need some for myself and others.

Interacting with nature teaches you about consent, community, cycles. To not take things for granted when you have them. To also know that the same way things go, they also come back, joy comes back. Then there is presence.

Making things from scratch allows you to pause and be present in the making. It allows you to have the sensory experience of smelling the honey like scent of the sap, to look at the golden light as you stir - you have to be with it for 30 minutes so it doesn’t burn. Sweet scented presence. It gives you time to cry, to let the smoke from the sap open something in you which you didn’t know was there. The sap doesn’t need to know why you’re crying and neither do you. The tears can flow as the golden syrup flows from the bark.

I remembered the countryside where I lived when I was a kid. We had cherry trees in the garden and with my brother we would wrap the branches with string to create a tree house, we’d climb the tree and let it hold us, like caterpillars in a cocoon. Memories of my grandad making “ginjinha” cherry liquor in the kitchen.

In 2022, I was part of a community project run by the charity May Project Gardens in collaboration with Habits & Heritage. The project involved planting an orchard in London Road Playing Fields - a public park located behind council estate flats in South London Mitcham. I ran an art workshop during the orchard planting event and also designed a map of the orchard so the community could easily identify the different fruit trees and find out more about the project. One of the variety of fruit trees we planted was a cherry tree.

Circles circling. From the cherry trees of my childhood, to the ones in my adulthood and I still get to meet a cherry tree again as if it was the first time.

It’s incredible how life surprises you. How something that was always there, that you thought you knew, all of a sudden transforms. You get to meet it all over again.

I don’t want to romanticise not having money. Making something from scratch is time consuming and time is money, not everyone has some to spare. I will still be buying Gum Arabic in the future if time and/or resources don’t allow me to use cherry sap. Because not doing my work and my art is a slow, painful death (a path I have been on in the past and will not revisit ever again) and you can’t be an activist if you’re dead. Eco anxiety is killing many artists, a genius plot to put the blame on the people who have hardly any power in making systemic change but who have the power to inspire, communicate, contradict, question, or even just simply spread joy.

Choose cherry sap because it feeds your soul, it connects you to your surroundings, to 30 minutes with your tears and a saucepan in the midst of all the chaos in this world. Sure, also choose cherry sap because it’s a more ecological alternative, but don’t reduce it to just that, it’s so much more than that. If we make choices from our anxiety instead of joy, anxiety is what we’re perpetuating. Leading to self-entitled, superiority complexes creating the ever so banal, black and white segregation of “I’m eco-conscious and care, and you’re lazy and careless”. Resulting in so many people turning against each other instead of linking arms and moving forward towards the real problem.

Thank you to the incredible places like May Project Gardens who do an incredible work at feeding the soul of the people and supporting young artists like me in doing what they love and sharing it with others. For allowing me the riches of stirring golden light, so I can make ink and a mark on this world.