The making of lemon tree

​The making of lemon tree
This is a project, for the light house art gallery in Wolverhampton, it began with 18 plastic lemons (see Lemon tree)
But I wanted more than a display of the remnants of pancake day
Lemons don’t grow well in this country, it can be done, but requires very careful tending, a warm sunny environment, the right soil and the right amount of water at just the right time. The plants are expensive to purchase and produce very few lemons, so why do some people grow them?  perhaps they like the challenge.
So, for this project, I purchased a plum tree, it can be planted in garden soil, they respond well to the British climate, get their requirements for heat sun and water from the sky, produce lots of fruit and are relatively inexpensive.
For the gallery ,this tree needed a pot, I didn’t want to add to the plastic problem with a plant pot, so I used  a collection of plastic bags which I layered and wove using a basket making technique, the layers remind me of the layers which develop in landfill, with colours of plastic tightly compressed against each other.
The plastic netting which many of our supermarket lemons are transported in, cause great problems for our wildlife, they trap animals which then struggle and become ever more entangled, the larger nets which are often used to contain these bags of fruit are adding to the problems in our oceans. To reference this, I stitched some of the fruit bags that I was given for an earlier piece, to the plastic of the pot, ensnaring plastic sea creatures into the netting. These sea creatures were a lucky find, left abandoned at the beach last summer.
The leaves were cut from green plastic pop bottles and wired to the lemons before hanging on the then still bare tree, during the time inside at the gallery, the tree came into leaf, so that it had both plastic lemon and real plum tree leaves.