We started with a pun this morning and, since we’re still going to be talking about a tree, we thought we might as well continue with the theme, hence the title of this blog.

We’re looking at adding a whole series of new London walks next year to be led by our team of freelance Blue Badge Guides who we’ve been working with more and more this year.

Blue Badge Guides are, quite simply, the best trained and most professional guides in the world.

The course that they have to do to attain their guiding qualification is both grueling and in depth. Yet they emerge with the ability to be able to guide on any subject and in any part of London and other parts of the country.

So that is why we have been using more and more Blue Badge Guides on our London walks.

One of the areas we are going to be branching out into next year (hence the awful puns about turning over a new leaf and branching out) is Art Tours of London. That is why we have been taking you inside Tate Modern in our last few blogs and will continue to to so in the days ahead.

This morning’s London Walking Tour blog ended with Penone with his Tree of Twelve Metres taking an industrial beam that he had purchased from a saw mill back to its basic form as a tree.

Penone makes us aware of the simple fact that everything made of wood was once a tree, so he has extracted from the beam the shape of a tree that was fossilized within.

He has gone back over the entire phenomenon of growth and traced the moment when the hand of man brought the trees growth to a halt.

Penone said of his work “I consider my work in a certain sense like a film sequence, shot in the opposite direction and strongly accelerated.”

So his Tree of 12 metres can be looked at in three phases.

At the base of each half of the tree we see the initial beam.

Then you can see the chisel marks that led to the moment when the still unfinished tree surfaced from the beam.

Finally you can look up at the tree restored to its form.

Looked at in this way it is a very beautiful, even graceful work and is illustrative of the concept that art is often not what it seems, because when you know the background of how Penone created this, you realsie that, what at first seems to be nothing more than two trees displayed as art, is in fact a carefully chiseled sculpture carved with all the skill and precision of a Renaissance sculptor.

We’ll be moving on in Tate Modern very shortly and having a look at two more art works in the Energy and Process wing at Tate Modern.

You can, if you wish, join us on one of our Jack the Ripper Walks or even enjoy one of the other Walking Tours that we offer to groups on a private basis.