november zine photography & forest wandering

Well, the November ‘25 zine is now officially live.

I’ve decided to make this the first Jolly End Co. blog post. People who purchase the November ‘25 zine will find a few photographs in there which were taken in my wanderings in McCarthy Woods and the Arboretum in Ottawa, Canada.

There were a lot of really neat things to be found in my woodland excursions, but alas, there’s just no way to include them all, or even a majority of them, in a zine I’m trying to keep between 25-30 pages long. There wound up being way too many pictures that just didn’t make the cut. Some of them are very cool though, so I decided to share my favourites out of the discard pile for free on this blog. A lot of these are interesting but I just couldn’t come up with poems to suit them. Maybe they’ll inspire you to write something!

These first photos were an experiment to capture views of the underside of the forest canopy through holes in a holey leaf. It didn’t turn out as something that fit the old timey antique vibe of the November ‘25 zine, but the experiment had a kind of surreal quality and trippy spatial element I think has a lot of potential. You may see more leaf photos like this in a future project someday.

This birch was very interesting with the dark stripes and patches on its trunk. The additional element of the sun being a floating orb in the background makes it feel even weirder. All in all, a very cool tree.

Again, another odd tree. I’m not entirely sure what I’m looking at here. I assume it’s a man-made decision to have the diagonal suspension of the one trunk within the other trunk. Is it to keep animals out? Is it to protect the integrity of the larger tree with the hollow in it? Is it tree cannibalism? Who can say? Whatever it is, it’s interesting.

Speaking of trees eating trees, whatever is happening here is absolutely wild to me.

I boosted the saturation on this picture to try to emphasize how much more luminous it looked in real life and even then the image doesn’t fully capture a) how glowing these leaves were and b) how they happened to be turning colours in a natural gradient. It was a really lovely little bit of nature magic to see them suspended in mid air like a perfect little gradient swatch.

There was copious fungi of various kinds, none of which fit the vibe of the zine but all of which deserved to be admired.

This short tree (or former tree?) was not doing much in the way of being alive. A zomb-tree, if you will.

This image does not convey how absolutely mindbogglingly long this fallen tree was.

Not watermarking this one because it feels odd to do that to a memorial bench (I presume this is a memorial). If you’re wandering the grounds of the Arboretum and surrounding pathways you may find it for yourself… (hint for its location: “educational proximity”). I thought it was a particularly good message to end on.

I encourage anyone passing through the area to check out the Arboretum and/or McCarthy Woods if you want some interesting experiences - you never know what oddities will cross your path when you go a-rambling.

Wherever you are, I hope your wanderings are full of enjoyable curiosities. To anyone who purchas(ed/es) the November ‘25 zine - thank you.

- Witness Ellis