The Garden Of Jane Trelawney

It's Monday afternoon and quite a nice day for February. I've just been for a walk up town. In the Air Ambulance shop I found a nice hardback copy of  As I Walked Out One Midsummer's Morning by Laurie Lee published in 1969 with a very attractive dust jacket. It's one of the best books I have ever read so it's nice to get another copy. In the Dorothy House shop I found Reasons To Be Cheerful, The Best Of Ian Dury and The Diary Of Alicia Keys. They were only 50p each, so I was well chuffed. I'll tell you more about them at a later date. In the meantime I am listening to The Trees, BBC Sessions which a friend gave me years ago and I hadn't played for a while. It reminded me that I wrote a story about The Trees ages ago, so I thought I would dust it off and show it to you. Sorry if you have read it before..............

Back in 1974 I was living in a little village called Summerhill in North Wales and worked at a place called The Metal Box Company. My friend Dave worked there as well. We were quality control inspectors.We had to go on a weeks course to learn how to use all these instruments such as micrometers and we learned it all in about half a day. The lady teaching us couldn't believe we could learn it all so quickly. Although the company was called Metal Box Company what we actually made at this place was plastic bottles such as Fairy Liquid and Domestos. We had to do hourly checks on the bottles to make sure they were alright. We did this in about two minutes. This left Dave and I about 58 minutes in every hour to throw plastic bottles at each other and mess about. It was mad working there, we used to call it the 'Mental' Box Company. Everyone who worked there was bonkers.
Dave and I got sick of the sight of each other because we were living in the same house and working together. One day I kicked him in the leg and we walked to work ten yards apart from then on.
To cut to the chase and get to the point of this story, Dave started going out with this girl called Sula who came from Dolgellau or somewhere up there near Snowdonia near the place where the Tipi people lived. She was a student at Wrexham Technical College. She started coming round our house all the time. Sula bought this album round that she kept playing. I asked her what it was called and I thought she said, The Garden Of Jane Trelawney.

That name struck a chord with me because when I was a kid one of my favourite books was Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson and one of the characters in it was Squire Trelawney who is in the very first chapter if I remember. I liked this album because it was in the folk/rock idiom and I was already a huge fan of Fairport Convention and this was more of the same. The band was called The Trees and I think Sula actually knew them. The singer was Celia and she eventually married a famous DJ called Pete Drummond. The album had songs such as Nothing Special, Silkie, She Moved Through The Fair, I Am A Road And I Know Where I'm Going To. Sadly the days at Summerhill ended and I left, never to return.

Forty long years went by until one day I was on the phone to a friend of mine, and we were talking about old rare albums and I said, "Have you ever heard of an album called The Garden Of Jane Trelawney?".

"Heard of it?, I've got it, I'll make you a copy if you want".
A few days later I was listening to an album I hadn't heard for decades and all the memories of the days in Summerhill came flooding back. When I looked at the cover I had a real shock though. The album wasn't called The Garden Of Jane Trelawney at all, it was called The Garden Of Jane Delawney. I don't care though, for me it will always be Jane Trelawney.
That is not the end of the story though because a friend on the internet called Richard offered me a CD called BBC sessions by the Trees which I snatched up and also Richard sent me a CD of demo's by The Trees. So now I have three albums by the great but short lived Trees.