The Garden of Jane Delawney was the debut album of British folk rock band Trees.
Trees
Rediscovering the mystic beauty of UK psych-folk outfit Trees
Contemporaries of Pentangle and Fairport Convention, the group is now the subject of a lovingly curated box set reissue.
David Costa’s home sits almost equidistant between Stonehenge and Glastonbury in England’s Somerset county. For the 73-year-old graphic designer, who helped create the cover art for Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Queen’s A Night at the Opera, it’s the perfect location to wait out the pandemic, and to contemplate retirement. His home’s locale is also, as he says with a knowing laugh, “pretty apt” when it comes time to field a Skype call about his days as guitarist in Trees, the acid-folk quintet that bloomed for a brief four years in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
The group was one of many British artists in that era who were fusing the traditional folk music of their home country with the psychedelic rock that was being baked to perfection on the West Coast of the United States. Like Costa’s home, the music of Trees stood at the musical midway point between England’s mystical, pagan past and the electric sounds celebrated at Glastonbury.
Though Trees were part of a scene that included luminaries like Fairport Convention, Pentangle, and the Incredible String Band, their two lush, incandescent albums—1970’s The Garden of Jane Delawney and 1971’s On The Shore—never achieved widespread acclaim. In the five decades since their inception, the group’s legacy has been kept alive through the efforts of dedicated fans like Danger Mouse, who built the title track for Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere on a sample of Trees’ version of the traditional ballad “Geordie.” Other artists, like modern folk musician Sally Anne Morgan stumbled upon the band after a night spent going down a YouTube wormhole.
Trees “Polly On the Shore”
On the Shore is the second (and last) album by British folk rock band Trees. It was recorded in October 1970, and released in January 1971.
Celia Humphris provides vocals on “Polly On the Shore”
The story behind “On The Shore” by Trees
The English Folk Dance and Song Society headquarters in London, otherwise known as Cecil Sharp House, became a Mecca in the late 1960s to young musicians and singers. Different than those who flocked the place in previous decades, they were armed with electric guitars and smoked rolled cigarettes that smelled funny. Like their predecessors they mined the vast library of traditional folk songs that passed unrecorded through generations of singers for nuggets of melodies and harmonies to make their own.
Fairport Convention, mavericks of the style known as folk rock, did just that and in 1969 released two of the genre’s most celebrated albums, Unhalfbricking and Liege and Lief. The following year another band followed the same pattern and released two wonderful albums that put a new spin on traditional folk songs.
They were much less successful commercially and short lived as a result, but their albums survived the test of time very well. This is the story of Trees, who in 1970 released two albums, the second of which – On The Shore, is a true classic [ . . . ]
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