by Freya Sierhuis/ The InTREEgue Literature Sub-Group

W. S. Merwin was a prolific poet, playwright and translator, who spent his early career living in London, Boston and New York. In 1976, Merwin moved to Hawaii to study Zen Buddhism, eventually settling in Peʻahi Valley on the north shore of Maui. Here, he built, together with his wife Paula Dunaway, an ecologically conscious home, and reforested the land surrounding it which had been ravaged by plantation agriculture. Over forty years, Merwin and his wife planted more than 3,000 trees from 480 species of palms, including endemic and endangered varieties. ‘He transformed a place once considered wasteland into a lush 18-acre tropical garden that is now considered one of the most important collections of palms in the world’ (Merwin Conservancy). These poems by Merwin because they reflect on the presence, real and symbolical of trees in our lives, and on the defiance embodied in the planting of a tree.

‘Place’ From: The Rain in the Trees (1988)

On the last day of the world

I would want to plant a tree

what for

not for the fruit

the tree that bears the fruit

is not the one that was planted

I want the tree that stands

in the earth for the first time

with the sun already

going down

and the water

touching its roots

in the earth full of the dead

and the clouds passing

one by one

over its leaves

by Ruby Smith, Green OPPAtunities 

The Scots pine is the most widely distributed species of conifer in the world. It inhabits an impressive swath of the planet, with natural distribution across the entirety of Europe and Northern Asia. As such, these pines on campus have likely been a familiar sight to many of the 186,700 students who have attended the University of York from 195 countries. Its resilient constitution, originally adapted to the windswept highlands of Scotland, allows it to thrive in both shallow, sandy soils and inhospitable peat. With their skinny needles, these trees are able to photosynthesise throughout winter whilst in more arid climates their thick bark can withstand the destructive force of wildfires. With this mighty capacity for endurance, it comes as no surprise that Scots pines can even be found in regions beyond the Arctic Circle!

Quite appropriately, the Scots pine has a strong legacy of aiding human travel. As pines were typically more sparsely-distributed in England than they were in Scotland, they were used as waymarkers along trails in southern regions, conspicuous amongst leafier coniferous trees. Able to grow up to 30m in less than a decade, their tall, straight, and study trunks were fashioned into sleepers to run alongside railway tracks, or else served as imposing masts for ships.

Beyond enabling travel across land and sea, Scottish legend claims that certain trees of this species can facilitate transport into the fairy world. Such is demonstrated by the disappearance of Reverend Robert Kirk in Aberfoyle, 1691. After writing a book exposing the ‘secret commonwealth’ of fairies living on nearby Doon Hill, Kirk was abducted by the enraged fae and imprisoned beneath a Scots pine that still stands today, aptly called the ‘Fairy Tree’. With centuries-old ‘granny’ pines boasting sprawling, gnarled limbs and girths greater than 6 metres, it perhaps comes as no surprise that these trees in particular have inspired tales of otherworldly happenings.

Nowadays, the Scots pine still helps us to travel in more discrete, inventive manners. While no longer circumnavigating stretches of open ocean, their trunks can be turned into telegraph poles that assist us in sustaining connections with one another across large distances. What’s more, the timber of Scots pines continues to play a part in transporting us to immaterial lands – not by hosting portals for meddling creatures, but rather by being pulped, meshed, screened, and dried to make the paper that forms newspapers, sketchpads, and books.

Resilient, practical, intrepid, and mystical, the Scots pine has earned the reverence expressed in the Gaelic proverb ‘cruaidh mar am fraoch, buan mar an giuthas’: ‘hard as the heather, lasting as the pine’.

Treemendous have planted nearly 100,000 trees in greater York. They have now merged with St Nick’s and are directing their resources towards St Nick’s Green Corridors Project, that seeks to create bigger, better and more joined up green spaces that conserve nature whilst supporting our communities.

The St Nick’s website offers a great range of poems by local poets who have taken inspiration from the reserve, read aloud for you to listen to: https://www.stnicks.org.uk/visit-us/visit-us-virtually/poems/

Drax Power Station in Selby, North Yorkshire, is the UK’s largest powerplant. Originally built to as a coal plant, it was gradually converted to run on biomass, and it now burns millions of tonnes of imported wood pellets every year.

Drax currently receives about £2 million in subsidies per day, and by 2027 when its current subsidies expire it will have received a massive £11 billion in green subsidies. A large part of these subsidies come from our energy bills, forcing the public to foot the bill for Drax’s tree burning. (source: Greenpeace, ‘Ten reasons to stop subsidising Drax Power Station’)

The demand for biomass energy in the UK is causing significant harm to forests globally, impacting regions such as the US, Canada, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Portugal. Biomass energy production relies on the harvesting of wood from biodiverse forests, threatening vulnerable wildlife and ecosystems. 

Multiple investigations, and Drax’s own emails, have shown that Drax has repeatedly sourced from Primary and Old-Growth forests in British Columbia. These forests are known for their rich biodiversity and complex ecosystems. Logging for biomass is putting additional strain on imperilled species like the Woodland Caribou, Canada Lynx and American marten. (source: Greenpeace, Ten Reasons to stop subsidising Drax Power Station

Drax is currently being sued by communities in the southern U.S for poisoning residents, as well as by its own workers in the UK for failing to protect employees from wood dust pollution. The corporation is also under investigation by the Financial Conduct Authority, and has violated environmental regulations 11,378 times since 2014 in the US alone. (source: Stop Burning Trees Coalition)

A new partnership between Drax and the University of York?

After the government minister Michael Shanks announced that in 2027 Drax would come to play a reduced role in the UK’s energy generation, Drax seems to be branching out its activities to make up for lost subsidies. It is bidding with partners York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority and York University to become one of the UK’s five AI growth zones (AIGZ). Mayor David Skaith claims it could make the Vale of York "Silicon Vale in the long term”.

But new analysis by US-based Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has found that the data centre could burn almost 2.5 million tonnes of wood per year by 2030 and almost 5 million tonnes per year after that. Another estimate, using Drax figures, gives lower but still huge numbers – 1.7m tonnes of wood per year by 2030 and 3.4m tonnes per year after that.

Matt Williams, Senior Advocate for NRDC, said: “Some search engines promise to plant a tree every time you use them – this data centre could end up burning a tree every time it’s used.“Drax is facing an Ofgem audit of its whole supply chain and an investigation by the Financial Conduct Authority. "Now it is running out of places to peddle its dirty energy and looking in desperation to data centres. "Earlier this year the Government promised to limit the amount of electricity Drax is allowed to produce after 2027. This deal would let Drax bypass this limit by the back door. Also, power supplied to data centres wouldn’t be subject to the same regulations, making this a Wild West bioenergy market”.

Source: Fears Drax-powered AI centre may 'burn a tree every time it is used’, Alexandra Wood, The Yorkshire Post, 24 September 2025