For once it was easy to find the tree of the month for my tree calendar – based on the ancient celtic tree calendar – namely the hazel, whose month (according to one version of the calendar) is from 5 August to 1 September. I found a nice group of hazels growing next to the path following the shore near Herttoniemi Manor from a map on the internet that listed fruit trees and bushes with berries in Helsinki. These hazels did not have any nuts, though, or hardly any traces of them, really. But they looked thriving and there was no doubt they were representatives of the common hazel, Corylus Avellana. I walked among them and tried to find a suitable framing for the image, including some water but not the houses. At first I sat on a rock next to one of the hazels near the path, and placed my camera in the middle of the bushes. Then I tried to find animate with more space and placed the camera on the lawn, standing in or amongst the branches holding on to one of the thicker stems. In Finnish there is a satin “kolmas kerta toden sanoo”, meaning something like “the third time is the real one”. And that proved correct this time. For the third image I found a bush with several stems bowed in a way that I could venture to sit on them, actually sitting in the small tree, and that version seemed like the nicest one, despite the darkening of the sky towards the end. Only when I left the park and walked back towards the metro station, returning to the city centre, did the rain start.
The material is now edited into three videos, Hazel in August 1 (10 min. 40 sec.), Hazel in August 2 (10 min. 10 sec.) and Hazel in August 3 (9 min. 35 sec.) and I still think the third version is the “real” one.