Listen: on our site, PRX, Mixcloud — full track list

This week on the Earth Eclectic Radio Hour, host Laura Dedelow marks World Environment Day with the announcement of the inaugural Earth Eclectic Music Award — and the recipient is Kate Daisy Grant and Nick Pynn of Sussex, England, for their album Songs for the Trees. The thousand-dollar prize, underwritten by the Gaian Way, goes to an album Laura and Bart describe simply as cohesive in vision and extraordinary in execution: a collection of songs drawn from the Ogham alphabet, the ancient Irish tree-based writing system in which each letter is associated with a specific tree, its kennings, its mythological resonances, its medicine.

Kate Daisy Grant follows the announcement with a spoken reflection on how the album was made — including the practice of going out to find each tree before writing its song, asking permission, and waiting to receive what the tree wished to impart. It is, she says, one of the greatest privileges of her life. Nick Pynn, her husband and the album’s multi-instrumentalist, provides the intricate string arrangements that give each song its particular atmosphere, rooted and reaching at once.

The episode is structured as a full tree-song hour in honor of the award: Gypsy Dreams offer an instrumental medley of “Wild Mountain Thyme” and “The Rowan Tree” from The Old Rowan Tree; R. Scully of New Orleans brings the gentle folk counsel of “The Trees Told Me” from What Should I Wear; Ivan Duch contributes the instrumental “Old Tree Talk” from the Druidic reverie of Wode: Of Merlin, Magic and Druids; and Andy Roberts offers his own wry, affectionate setting of “The Rowan Tree,” in which a rowan planted by the front door keeps four witches — one sly, one obsessed with time, one playing with fire, and one who uses her powers for good — at a respectful distance.

Kate Daisy Grant and Nick Pynn return for “The Shadow on the Lowlands (Willow Song),” a grief-song from Songs for the Trees in which the willow becomes mediator between the living and the drowned dead, before Hieros Gamos offer their devotional “Oak Tree” as a meditation on breaking and regeneration, and Peach and Quiet follow with “Song from a Tree” — a contemplative piece from Beautiful Thing that dissolves the boundaries of self and other into a single shared presence. Marko Polo, the St. Louis artist and fellow award nominee, contributes “Magnolia Bloom” from his all-tree album Tree Sounds, celebrating a flower that existed before bees evolved to carry its pollen.

Two pre-release tracks from Kate and Nick’s forthcoming album Songs from the Grove bracket the full program: “The Grove” appears early, and “Elm” — sung from the perspective of a once-great tree felled by disease, reaching its arms toward stars even as it is buried — closes the set with the most devastating image in the hour: Am I only a memory now?

The episode’s final movement is entirely unexpected. Laura explains that Kate mentioned in their correspondence that the award money would go toward the healthcare of their Greek rescue dog, Lemon — whose name echoes Laika’s affectionate nickname from the Soviet scientists who sent her to die in orbit: Limonchik, Little Lemon. In that echo, Laura finds the permission to close the program with co-host Bart Everson’s own band, Half Pagan, performing “Laika” from the album Lamentations — a song that recounts with unflinching precision and unexpected tenderness the fate of the first animal sent into space, who made 2,570 orbits before her capsule burned on reentry, and who wanted only to be a good dog. It is, Laura confesses, a warm fuzzy. And it is also a quietly perfect coda to an episode about trees and animals and the more-than-human world and the things we owe to those who cannot ask for payment.

Photo: Backyard Magnolia Fraser by Laura Chamberlain Dedelow