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There is great pleasure to be had in looking again at things that might at first seem indistinguishable. Just ask Sam Vale, an academic and artist whose work is concerned with archives and collections and how the act of gathering together objects can reveal new narratives or understanding.
In his recently published book, A Typology of British Cherry Blossom, Vale continues to indulge these interests by presenting a complete collection of images that depicts all 323 UK varieties of cherry blossom. At a glance there is little difference between the blossoms to speak of, but Vale’s book invites us to look closer and enter the wonderful world of pomology – the study and science of fruit trees.
The work grew from a project that looks at the relationship of cherries to Kent, where Vale is based. After he had moved there and keen to make work that responded to his new home in some way, Vale drew inspiration from a quote from Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers: “Kent, sir — everybody knows Kent — apples, cherries, hops, and women.” The county indeed has a long association with cherries thanks to the cultivation of its cherry orchards under Henry VIII.
Vale’s research led him to look through a number of pomological books, some 200 years old, but what he noticed was that while these carefully illustrated books included diagrams of the fruit, leaves and branches, the actual cherry blossom was seldom recorded “because it was considered too uniform and traditional illustration too limited to reveal the nuances that distinguish varieties,” Vale writes in the book’s introduction.
Now, with modern advances in photography, these omissions can be corrected, and Vale decided to fill the archival gap he had noticed. His task took him to the National Fruit Collection at Brogdale in Kent where a pair of each variety of cherry available in the United Kingdom is kept for scientific purposes. Every blossom was plucked from the tree and photographed individually before being presented collectively as a typology to enable readers to closely study the subtle differences between varieties.
Arranged alphabetically according to variety and grouped into four sections (early, mid, late and no season), the blossoms not only call for closer investigation on an aesthetic level, but also invite enquiry into the names which relate to the growers or places from where the cherries derive. You get a history through the name. One variety is Early Rivers; the family name is ‘Rivers’ and the blossom comes early in the season. This information isn’t given in the book, (Vale disclosed it separately), but the point is there are many layers to peel back which the interested reader is encouraged to do.
Beautifully designed, the book, on one level, preserves the history of the collection at Brogdale as it was between 2015 and 2017 when the images were made, a collection that is likely to change as what is kept is inevitably assessed and revised. But more than this, Vale’s labour of love is a poetic reminder of the immense joy and satisfaction that can come from not just looking, but really looking, and looking again and again and again.
– reviewed for Photomonitor by Gemma Padley
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