Borden’s fresh, uncontrived images and Thornton’s riveting short poems are both intimate portrayals and arresting testimonies, glimpses into the lives of individuals and family groups enveloped by and devoted to the life-giving and life-affirming bounty of natural woodlands. Her texts are by turns lyrical, conversational, declarative… One minute enigmatically suggestive of moods, feelings beyond words that walking in verdant spaces amidst trees can elicit and then will come a sharply observed description, balancing the mythical with an aptly down-to-earth mundanity, a reminder that we are very much beholden to and a part of nature, that it’s a place of work as well as wonder.

The title, Four Hugs Wide, derives from a description of how big a tree might be. Borden and Thornton spoke to farmers, artists, activists and campaigners, witches, musicians, iron age tool makers, healers, health workers and more. In Windshook, a poem inspired by meeting with farmer Patrick Clark, there’s a line about commingling with wooded landscapes that perhaps talks for all of those featured in the project: “‘You become part of it, and it becomes part of you’ / It can help with almost any problem.”

Whether people’s relationship with trees is symbiotic, workaday or tends toward the sacred, their various attunements to nature, according to Borden is “A celebration of living your life according to the maxim that we are part of a greater whole. […] We are not these atomised individuals, we are part of an eco-system.” And while the Four Hugs Wide collaboration pre-dated Covid 19, the pandemic has not only hugely emphasised both the interdependency of humans but also the importance of co-existing harmoniously with the natural world.