The Zephaniah forest

David Springer remembers the first time he saw his eldest brother, the writer and poet Benjamin Zephaniah, in Nature – a different man from the one he’d grown up with. Four decades later, Springer is helping to cultivate a forest in his brother’s memory.

As a young teenager in the early 1980s, Springer travelled to Zephaniah’s home in London to spend school summer holidays with him. Zephaniah often talked about his visits to Epping Forest, a vast green space on the outskirts of the city, home to over 50,000 ancient trees.

“We used to go at night-time under the cover of darkness, and we spent about two, three hours in Epping Forest, just walking around,” says Springer. “That was probably my first glimpse into seeing that he was very different in Nature. He talked differently, he walked differently. He would tell me to smell the different smells.”

Holistically

But Zephaniah hadn’t always been this way.

“When we all lived together as a family in Birmingham, if he did have an interest in trees it wasn’t apparent. He was a petty criminal and hung around with some very unsavoury characters. We didn’t see him much because he was always out,” his brother recalls.

Zephaniah moved to London in the late 1970s and began working at a shop called The Whole Thing, which was located on West Ham Lane in Stratford, East London and had a bookshop called Page One upstairs and a vegan warehouse below.

“I think that’s where it all started,” says Springer. “Benjamin was now mixing with people who were committed to a greener planet and who helped push forward this idea that we are walking on this living organ.”

Springer explains how his brother was in the right place at the right time, and how his love of t’ai chi and alternative medicine went holistically with this new outlook.

Siblings

“This guy’s from Birmingham. He’s got a love for spoken word and poetry, ends up in a shop that has its own publishing house, that is vegan, vegetarian, that cares about the planet. He’s this Rastafarian hustler from Birmingham, in this shop with these people, meeting them for the first time, and they seriously influenced him,” he says.

Springer describes Zephaniah as a very serious person, someone people wouldn’t want to mess with. But underneath he always cared about human beings and the underdog.

“The person he became is who he really wanted to be,” he says.

The two brothers both came to have a deep care for Nature, but through different paths. When their parents split up, Springer stayed with his father whilst Zephaniah chose to live with his mother. 

During that time, Springer found his own connection with Nature. He describes how, when he was very young, social services would send the siblings to a farm in Worcestershire for the summer holidays. 

Memory

“That’s where I first got my love for Nature – it was being on the farm,” he recalls. “We’d go there and we’d wander around the fields and see animals, and we’d be allowed to just go and roam.”

Springer says Zephaniah particularly loved anything with roots. He knew how to plant and how to replenish the soil. Springer thinks his brother’s dyslexia helped him soak up information in a better way, so that what local farmers told him stayed prominently in his mind. By the time he’d cultivated his own piece of land and was eating what he grew, he was famous locally for his potatoes.

When Zephaniah was younger, Springer says, his poems were against apartheid, racism, fascism, bombs – but the plight of the planet was not among those themes. 

“Those are the poems that I know, those poems about injustices around the world. But I think he went on to explore Nature and the planet, and green spaces in our communities, going deeper, as he got older.”

After his brother died, Springer started to wonder how he could honour his memory through trees. “He wanted his supporters and people who loved him to not give flowers or make statues, but to plant trees,” he says.

Planting

On behalf of his family – Springer is the youngest of nine siblings – at the Benjamin Zephaniah Family Legacy Group, Springer contacted Birmingham TreePeople, a group of volunteers who plant, protect and promote trees in an urban setting. “And, hey presto, they were thinking along the same lines as me.”

Springer suggested using North Birmingham, where the siblings were all born, as a location. He explains that there’s misinformation claiming Zephaniah was born in Handsworth, when it was actually Aston.

Birmingham TreePeople and Zephaniah’s family are now planning the Zephaniah Forest, which will be planted at Burbury Park, just a stone’s throw from where the siblings were born in Newtown. Their parents’ first house was on Farm Street, which runs parallel to the park.

“I went down there recently, and it’s a fairly rundown neighbourhood. The Council and countless city councils over decades have neglected that part of Birmingham,” Springer explains. “Hopefully it will start a change in terms of the City Council focusing on these sorts of areas with green spaces.”

This blueprint for how to create green spaces will also bring the community into nature’s fold. Local people and schools will do the planting this coming winter, perhaps fostering a sense of ownership and belonging with these local trees.

Permanence

Throughout the small park 65 trees will be planted, one for each year of Zephaniah’s life. Each tree will have a QR code on it, linking through to poems written specially for the project. 

Birmingham TreePeople have invited Brummie poets to submit their pieces, to be coupled with the trees. They are also crowdfunding over £40,000 for the project.

“When we’re all dead and gone, Benjamin’s memory will still be here. People will be able to see his legacy and feel his legacy,” Springer says. 

“I hope that Nature ends up being synonymous with Benjamin’s name, as well as his work, and that his love for Nature is on an equal footing. I think he’d really love that, if he knew that he was making people engage with Nature and have conversations about Nature.”

The story Springer tells of his brother is one of redemption. A young man up to no good, who found a love of Nature and a place for his poetry. 

And at the end of this circle is the Zephaniah Forest, giving permanence to the poet’s legacy, back where it all started.

This Author

Katie Dancey-Downs is a freelance journalist who writes about human rights, the planet and culture. She is also assistant editor at Index on Censorship magazine. You can find out more about the Zephaniah Forest at tinyurl.com/zephaniah-forest.