A willow along Rennie’s River (not the one from the story though!)

Making of a documentary

I recently made a radio documentary on urban forests and our relationship with trees and, while it’s still fresh in my mind, I thought I would share the process of putting together such a fairly complex story here. The documentary focused on an old willow tree along the banks of Rennie’s River in St. John’s, Newfoundland. I don’t really have big secrets to divulge and you need to keep in mind that this is my way of making a piece of documentary work and not necessarily the correct way or the only way to go about it. This was a radio documentary, but my photography projects follow the same pattern.

For me, any documentary project starts with some sort of a question. From there, that nagging question tends to grow into an obsessive amount of research. The important bit to understand here is that most of that research will not appear in the story, but it will provide me with the ability to ask better questions way down the road when I actually start talking to people.

The Grand Old Willow Tree story is a result of a persistent rumour I kept hearing while working on a radio documentary about Rennie’s River and my pandemic daily walks. That persistent rumour said that the City of St. John’s had plans to cut down one of the largest and oldest trees along the river — an old willow. For that original documentary, I talked with Dr. Carrisa Brown who studies boreal forests and trees and while most of our conversation did not make it into that story, I had a feeling that Dr. Brown would have more interesting stories to tell. And so there was my first source for this new docuemntary. But I was still a long way from actually talking to her or anybody else.

While I love the old willow and would hate to see her go, there could have been good reasons for the city to cut down that tree. I wanted to make sure I understood the policies and practices surrounding those kinds of decisions. Some time ago, I read Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, which I liked despite some mild misgivings about the science behind it. The book led me to the work of Dr. Susan Simmard at the University of British Columbia who recently published Finding the Mother Tree. At the time of my research, the book was not yet out, but there was an excellent presentation she gave on the project as well as a TEDTalk.

A bit of googling led me to Dr. Diana Beresford-Kroeger and her fascinating work about trees and forests that blends spirituality, science, and philosophy. TVO documentary Call of the Forest: The Forgotten Wisdom of Trees featuring her work was another excellent piece of the puzzle. That, of course, led to more reading. Here is the reading list I initially went through:

1. The Social Life of Trees, NYT Magazine
2. Scientists Say Tree Planting Initiatives Might Be Backfiring, Medium
3. Ancient Trees Show When The Earth’s Magnetic Field Last Flipped Out, NPR
4. Drveće, TBD
5. Talking with the Botanist Who Talks to Trees, The Tyee
6. Diana Beresford-Kroeger on the Flawed Thinking that Got Us to Climate Crisis, The Tyee
7. ‘Mother Trees’ and Diana Beresford-Kroeger: A Special Relationship, The Tyee
8. True Freedom? Diana Beresford-Kroeger Calls It ‘Saoirse’, The Tyee
9. If We Plant Billions of Trees to Save Us, They Must Be Native Trees, The Tyee
10. Disease outbreaks more likely in deforestation areas, study finds, The Guardian
11. Climate scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap, The Conversation
12. Tree Thinking, Places Journal
13. Scattered trees are keystone structures — Implications for conservation, Biological Conservation, doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2006.04.023
14. Around the World in 80 Trees by Jonathan Drori (This became one of my favourite books of all time with wonderful illustrations by Lucille Clerc.)
15. The Global Forest: Forty Ways Trees Can Save Us, Diana Beresford-Kroeger
16. Aliens and us by Ken Thompson in Granta. Issue 153
17. Of the Forest by Manari Ushigua in Granta. Issue 153
18. Conserving Forest Communities by Wendell Berry in Essays 1993–2017
19. On being asked for “A Narrative for the Future” by Wendell Berry in Essays 1993–2017
20. Imagination in Place by Wendell Berry in Essays 1993–2017

Through all that reading, it became obvious that a tree growing in a forest is one thing, but a tree growing in a city is quite another. So urban forests and urban forest management became the second line of inquiry, which ultimately led to Dr. Peter Duinker at Dalhousie University and Patrick Lydon, an artist in Osaka, Japan. Here is the urban forest reading list:

1. Buildings Like Trees, Cities Like Forest, by William McDonough & Michael Braungart
2. Introduction: Building The Urban Forest, Scenario Journal
3. Trees Map, city of Edmonton
4. Chapter 3. Benefits of Urban Forests, Tree Canada
5. The Value of Urban Forests in Cities Across Canada, TD Economics (PDF)
6. Eco-Cities, Wikipedia
7. Urban Forestry Manifesto, Stefano Boeri Architects
8. A City Designed by Trees, The Nature of Cities
9. The urban forest of the future: how to turn our cities into Treetopias, The Conversation
10. Urban-Tree Values, Halifax Tree Project
11. Ecosystem-based management revisited: Updating the concepts for urban forests, Landscape and Urban Planning Journal
12. In Support of Trees in the City, Canadian Urban Forest Research Group
13. Health and climate related ecosystem services provided by street trees in the urban environment, Environmental Health
14. St. John’s Urban Forest Management Master Plan, The City of St. John’s
15. Trees In Urban Design, by Paul Crabtree and Lysistrata “Lyssa” Hall

The Grand Old Willow Tree | © Bojan Fürst 2021

This was all interesting, but it lacked non-science bits. I loved that willow tree not just for its biology and the role it played in my city, but also because I felt a bit of awe when standing under her canopy. And so I dug into cultural and spiritual aspects of our connection to trees. That bit of research led to all sorts of interesting places: from the Japanese practice of Shinrin-Yoku or forest bathing, to an early Irish alphabet called Ogham where each letter was connected to a tree and the artist Katie Holten who created a tree typeface for our 21 century version of Ogham. I read essays like Michael McCarthy’s exploration of our connection to nature, and marvelled at the fact that German has a word for feeling alone in the woods — Waldeinsamkeit. I read Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory, which features a character loosely based on Dr. Simmard. Above all else, I enjoyed Patrick Lydon’s thoughtful essays and the wonderful nature mandalas.

Patrick’s writing also led me to Christopher Stone and his 1972 article Should Trees Have Standing? — Toward Legal Rights For Natural Objects, in Southern California Law Review.

Before I finished reading all of this stuff, I started reaching out to potential voices that would help me tell the story I wanted to tell. I reached out to Dr. Simmard, but her publicist thought that my audience was not large enough for her to give me some time. That was okay because I had a brilliant and passionate expert in Dr. Brown right here in St. John’s — and as a bonus, while Dr. Simmard sounded a bit stilted, Dr. Brown was bursting with energy.

Dr. Duinker in Halifax seemed like a logical choice for an urban forest expert and I knew that Patrick Lydon would bring a whole other perspective that would allow me to take the story in unexpected directions. Each of those interviews was about an hour long and absolutely fascinating.

I also sent an email to St. John’s city arborist asking what exactly were the city’s plans with the old willow.

These were the building blocks, together with sound and music, I had to build a coherent and, hopefully, interesting and thought-provoking documentary.

There is one more thing to do before writing the documentary script and that’s transcribing the interviews. This is not my favourite part of the process. It is a necessary part so some 13,000 words later, I was glad to get to actual writing.

I happen to like writing radio scripts. It’s a different kind of writing, looser in some ways, but much more disciplined in others. I constantly read out loud the bits I write and the clips that end up as a part of the script. There is less than 10 minutes of each hour-long interview that makes it into the final 27-minute documentary. It’s always hard to leave so much good stuff out and balance the story you want to tell with the best representation of the interviews and conversations you had.

The first draft is usualy quite different from where the story eventually ends up. I was very lucky to work with Angela Antle, the producer of CBC’s Atlantic Voice on this doc. She is a consummate professional and has an incredible ear for what makes a good radio. Once the script was done, we did the first read-through. This is where all the missing bits, overwritten bits, and boring bits show up. No matter how many documentaries you make, this is going to be a learning experience — nobody is going to listen to this more closely and with more experience and knowledge than the editor and producer you are working with.

This particular documentary needed a glue that would hold the whole structure together. I also needed to ditch bits and pieces that might be interesting as a part of my day job, but made for boring radio. Angela suggested some possibilities and pushed for a bit more of my personal narrative — something I generally avoid if I can help it. I really believe that as storytellers with access to publications we have an obligation to amplify voices other than our own. In this case, there was an additional personal story I was comfortable sharing as a part of the narrative that strengthened the argument that we need to recognize and nurture our relationships to trees.

The glue was unwittingly provided by the city arborist who took a month to answer my email about the city’s plans for the old willow and when he finally did write back, it sounded like something written by a public relations committee and edited by risk officers and city lawyers. So, on the advice of my partner who gets to hear all of my half-baked thoughts and script drafts, I built a bit of suspense around waiting for the email throughout the story. (The short answer, in case you wonder, is that they are not going to cut down the old willow — for now.)

After another read-through, it was time to record the narration and cut the actual clips from the interviews and, in this case, figure out how to incorporate the voice of Christopher Stone who in 1972 suggested that trees should have a legal standing in our courts. (A friend beautifully voiced a paragraph from Stone’s wise and prescient article.)

From here on the audio is in the hands of the producer who will make it sound the way a radio documentary should sound. This will include music selection and the creation of the soundscape that gives the whole story a certain atmosphere — a stimmung, as Germans would say. There is also a bit of time spent on turning the script into a web story, selecting, editing and preparing the photographs and artwork, which includes securing any permissions to publish the work I do not hold copyright for.

Voilà! A 27-minute radio documentary is born out of over 50 articles, books, novels, videos, media stories, and podcasts I listened to, read and watched, as well as out of half a dozen conversations I had that were narrowed down to three interviews, hours of transcribing, writing and recording and eventually publishing the whole thing.

And now it’s time to do it all over again for another story. ✖︎

Rennie’s River | © Bojan Fürst 2021

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• NOTE: By the time the documentary aired, the city has indeed decided to do some work around the old willow and along the lower part of the Rennie’s River. They removed the deck sitting between the willow’s trunks. Blocked access to the river with a piece of wooden fence and cut down a bunch of trees and brunches further up the river. The willow remains intact (although it is possible that they may have trimmed branches and trunks that used to be under the deck. It’s hard to say at the moment).