Our Story
The idea for the Weather Tree poster came from reading an account of Chinese family life written by an American woman staying with a Chinese family in 1920. She recalls helping the lady of the house prepare paints for use in the ‘Chart of the Lessening of the Cold’. This was an annual record kept as an aid to garden and farm work.
Each year she painted a tree on a silk scroll and beginning after the winter solstice, one leaf was painted each day according to the weather. A companion scroll recorded the harvest for the corresponding summer and autumn so that the effect of the winter weather on crops could be seen at a glance.
Scrolls recording the weather in this form had been kept continuously in this family for twenty-two generations and were stored in a pair of cabinets of black wood carved with garden and farm scenes.
In the early 1980s in Ripon, artist and keen gardener Dorothy Thelwall happened upon the story of the Chinese ‘Chart of the Lessening of the Cold’ and was inspired to create the Weather Tree poster to track the changing environment over the course of a year.
It’s easy to become disconnected from your environment. You have your head down at work, focus on the daily grind and may only notice the passing seasons at key points in the year such as seasonal celebrations.
It’s also easy to become disconnected from ourselves. With one eye constantly on the media cycle, we are afloat in an argumentative and increasingly polarised world.
The Weather Tree poster allows you to track the weather and/or your mood by colouring in a new leaf every day. We refer to this as tracking ‘Your Weather’.