Urban Trees

Sylvan Oracle began at Bussey Brook Meadow, part of the Arnold Arboretum in southern Boston. This 24 acre urban wild is set aside with minimal disturbance as a site for studying spontaneous urban vegetation. As a rewilding experiment, Bussey Brook Meadow is not some kind of atemporal nature separate from humans, but instead an richly interwoven, emergent, coproduced, biodiverse place. I have heard people refer to it as a mess; its unmanicured tangle in a ordered urban environment is often experienced as out of control, uncared for, ugly. Indeed there are many parts of Bussey Brook Meadow that are almost impossible to traverse; dense thickets of thorny underbrush repel leisurely strolling, the vines are winning. Nothing is labelled or cultivated for human pleasure and knowledge. It almost seems like Bussey Brook Meadow is set aside for its inhabitants; trees, shrubs, flowers, vines, animals, insects, and more. It is a living example of Darwin’s tangled bank:

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.-Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species

Here all beings are inextricably bound to each other, allowed to flourish in relation to other beings on the site, but also to the larger urban ecosystem.

The trees of Bussey Brook Meadow were mostly not planted intentionally as part of the Arboretum collection but were instead “planted” by seed dispersal, left there as the site became part of the Arboretum, or are “escapees” from the accessioned trees in the rest of the Arboretum.

Through a year of walking through the pathless ecological communities in all seasons and weather, I chose 26 trees to become part of Sylvan Oracle. These trees include ones considered “invasive” or “weed trees,” others that were collected in the nineteenth and early twentieth century by Arboretum botonists and have seeded themselves. Some of the trees are very familiar; we might recognize them from our urban strolls. Others are unwelcome in urban plantings. But each tree has its own role in the larger family of Bussey Brook Meadow, where each being affects and is affected by everyone else.

Urban Tree Oracle
2021-25

A multi-sensory, collective tool for climate resilience, fostering an embodied meeting of our our more-than-human kin, urban trees.

The Oracle

The Urban Tree Oracle is a child of ancient divination tools that look to the natural world for clues. Starting with the Celtic Ogham, an alphabet based on local trees often used for divination purposes, the Sylvan Oracle is influenced by this ancient druidic practice that is part of my ancestral heritage.

The Sylvan Oracle is also a tool to open our bodies, hearts, and minds to new ways of knowing trees as kin, as part of our larger family. Deeply indebted to the scholarship of many, including Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway, David Abram, and more, Sylvan Oracle’s set of embodied practices foster an animist awareness and a distancing from control, oppression, separation, and service.

Urban Trees

As the projet developed, I shifted the focus on the deck to urban trees: those beings that were planted by the city, that planted themselves in the city, that live on back yards or commercial properties, that thrive in urban wilds. All the trees that make up our urban tree canopy.

Inks

Each tree speaks through the Sylvan Oracle by way of its tannins, pigments, and material self. Thirty bottles of ink (some trees produce more than one color) are used to create oracle cards through a monoprinting process.