At the beginning of May 2020, I received an email from Kathy Gilfillan, an old friend and neighbour from the Wicklow hills. In April, John Boorman told Kathy that he was writing a nature diary, and as a director of the Lilliput Press, Kathy suggested he publish it. John agreed to continue the diary through the months of April, May and June, the duration of the national lockdown, and I was asked to illustrate it.
This would be our second collaboration of words and images. John had collected my paintings over the years and was particularly fond of a large watercolour of a beech tree I had painted around 1999. He rang me one day to tell me he was writing some poems about his trees and had written one about the painting. That led to him asking me to illustrate all the tree poems for Conclusions, his memoir published by Faber & Faber in February.