Tree Inks
Tree Care Hyde Park centers around a practice of making ink from the trees of the project. The ink is used in small gatherings to draw and write our reflections on our experience with and relationship to the trees.
I’ve been making ink from foraged materials for a decade. I stumbled upon this practice in 2013 as a way to give voice to a particular landscape I was creating work about. Since that time I’ve made inks for a number of different projects, including: Utopia Press and Sylvan Oracle.
Making ink locates us in place. I deepen into presence in the local ecology when I am foraging. I enter into a conversation with trees, the site, the weather, this moment as I offer gratitude to the trees.
Making ink is slow. My process is not scientific and will rarely produce consistent results in multiple batches. Instead I work with the trees in their season with water gathered from a river or rain or snow, adding as few binders and modifiers as possible to elicit a direct color from the plant. It takes time: steeping the bark or nut or fruit over many days to coax out the color, collecting the tree materials during foraging walks, using my solar oven to intensify the color.
Making inks feels like another way of knowing our more-than-human tree kin. I hesitate to say its a collaboration, but there is some reciprocal connection between me, the tree, and the ink.
I consider the inks to be the voice of the trees.
Hyde Park’s land, waters and trees are the unceded lands of the Massachusett Tribe traditional territory. The Massachusett took their name from the Algonquian term describing the area visible from the Great Hill, now referred to as the Blue Hills, which looks out over the 9.1 acres of Hyde Park. Hyde Park’s southern border along the Neponset River watershed is part of the traditional territory of the Neponset band of the Massachusett. The river and surrounding marshes provided vital sustenance and transportation for centuries. I join the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag in this gratitude they include on their website: “There are ways of perceiving and doing things in our community that trace back thousands of years. There are Medicine Ways thousands of years old that we still practice today. We thank our ancestors for keeping the traditions, for their foresight and the gifts they left to us.”