with thanks.
Being with a Tree
Trees & Shrubs
Archives are elusive and beautiful things. We thought we had viewed all of the documents related to planting on campus when Sonya, the University Archivist, and I found note of a 1936 “Trees + Shrubs” plan filed with some unrelated items. Upon pulling the file we found this incredible, 3’x7′ campus-wide plan of the University’s landscaping. Here we found verification of the commemorative and alumni trees, as well as the first clear species call-out on the rows of pin oaks.
The 1936 date confirms much of what we deduced on our visit to the tree-ring laboratory last week. While the specific planting date of each one of these incredible oaks may never be known exactly, we are moving toward confidence that the trees are ~80 years old.
Tree Time
How can we enter into thinking and seeing and imagining in tree time? What are the limits of detection these arboreal sensors operate within? How can we listen to particularly talkative tree rings? These were only some of the questions that Mike Stambaugh and his colleagues at the Missouri Tree Ring Lab introduced us to as we took a deep dive into the theory and practice of dendrochronology.
We held the world’s oldest oak specimen, learned of the process of cross dating, and my mind still swims at the worlds opening up in thinking landscape forensics. In mounting our One Tree cores, we have come to the conclusion that the trees are between 80 and 90 years old–putting their planting date likely sometime in the 1930’s. We will dive into the WashU yearbooks in the coming week to see if we might be able to corroborate this date which challenges some of our other diagnostic work.
Many thanks to all at Mizzou’s Tree Ring Lab for being such generous hosts!
How to Interview a Tree
What are the ways that plants “feel out their worlds”? Natasha Myers asks this question as she explores plant sensing and a broader “plant turn” in contemporary critical thought:
Myers_ConversationsOnPlantSensing
Alongside Myers, John Hartigan, editor of Aesop’s Anthropology, invites us to think about what it means to listen with plants. To think with and through and alongside other living things. “Living thinking” (rather than object thinking) is a mode of thought “that is relational, that recognizes how living ‘things’ interpenetrate and, in reality, are not things at all.”
[tre]email
A report in the Atlantic has a great article on how the city of Melbourne assigned trees email addresses so citizens could report problems. Instead, people wrote thousands of love letters to their favorite trees.
[Thank you to Sylvia Sukop for the tip and great conversation!]
Girdling
In an 8 hour durational video performance, artist Julius von Bismarck cuts down a tree with a pocket knife. The work consists of the artists encircling the tree in a slow and relentless unbuilding of the tree’s rings.
The title, Tree Analysis, seems to me to be a take on the sort of intimacy and distancing that such a durational piece might induce. A dismembering that fully implicates the executioner in both body and time. With the knife edge finding each layer of the tree’s growth, its undoing is rewritten in the wrist of the artist.
[Special thanks to the always amazing Amanda Bowles for this reference. Endless respect!]
Traces
The first iteration of the tree enclosure has been dismantled, but not without leaving its mark.
Keep an eye open for the next iteration.
Tree Sounding
How do we gain access to tree-ness? How are symptoms diagnosed from within the inaccessibility of a tree–its history, its girth, etc? These are some of the broader landscape forensic questions we have been asking throughout the term.
This past week we worked with the German physicist, inventor, and tree expert Frank Rinn to begin to map the interior of a tree using sound.
Yup, sound.
Frank has invented and manufactures a system for sonic tomography–the measurement of a tree’s cross-sectional density by means of sound-waves. 
With a girdle of 15+ sensors, the tree is sounded in a sort of arboreal perambulation–where each sensor is lightly tapped 5 times as the propagation time of the sound wave is measured at each of the other sensors. The resulting measurement is a map of the speed of sound through the medium of the tree.
Each vector in the chart to the left measures the relative time it took for the sound wave to reach a corresponding sensor. The resulting diagram of greens, oranges, yellows, pinks, and reds, is simply a visual coding of speed–with green being relatively fast, and red/pink being relatively slow (or nonexistent).
This set of measurement is then interpolated to form a density map on in the tomogram on the right. Here, a visualization of the wood density–and, perhaps, through experience in interpretation, strength–is charted in a communicable form.
As Frank is quick to point out that, while this tomographic system certainly communicates fundamental scientific information about the trees in question, this sort of imagining is fundamentally a political tool. In the politics of the visible, and in the politics of urban street-trees in particular, the ability to communicate the non-visible, the subcutaneous, allows urban foresters an immediate way to construct a slightly more informed landscape public.
At stake in this sort of measurement is the politics of diagnosis. Landscape is uniquely interpretable as a symptom: a symptom of ecological pressures, historical processes, and design intents. The traces of these (geo)histories, embedded as they are within the body of the tree, provide symptoms that can be diagnosed through a range of landscape forensic activities. Much of what we have been up to in this course is exactly this. Landscape forensics as method.
Tree Watcher
Enclosure awaiting…
The One Tree Project 