Justin Shoulder: people don’t just need didactic work to understand
Co-funded by the
Creative Europe Programme
of the European Union
Creative Europe Programme
of the European Union
I was tired of speed. I wanted to live to tree time. Those words start off Sumana Roy’s newly released book, ‘How I became a Tree’ [1]. In the work, she shares her admiration for trees; their nonviolent way of being, their ability to cope with loss, their ability to thrive on resources freely available. Mostly, Roy surveys trees’ ‘disobedience to human time’, their callous disregard for the rhythms of job and holidays. In stark contrast to tree time, we live according to a human time that rolls over us like a bulldozer, weighed down by the clocks, timers, and the clicking of seconds that determine concoctions such as salaries and deadlines. In the last week of August, a summer lab organised by performing arts institution Bunker brings together participants from 10 European countries in Ljubljana to exchange on the topic of urban trees; a week-long encounter in tree time.
Life along tree time holds a seductive promise. Although trees, like us, are bound to a circadian rhythm that determines night and day, the very same planetary spins that make up months and seasons, tree time shifts the very scale at which we are to think about time. It is a sort of zooming out: for a tree, a cycle of day and night may be like a single breath. Tree time can be a shift in time scales such as ‘phoenix growth’. Phoenix growth is the phenomenon of trees falling in the forest after the completion of their life span, only for new trees to spring up from their fallen trunks. Phoenix growth can be described as a tree walking in slow motion.[2] Each fallen tree from which new saplings spring is a step. Tree time here is the pace of a tree walking: at decades, even centuries, per step. Ursula K. le Guin’s writes a story of an oak tree who describes her complicity in the death of an automobile driver, as it moves at too slow a pace to get out of the way of the car in time. [3] When the scale of our own life span meets that of a tree, its outcomes can be violent, alienating, and abrupt experience.
Yet we use tree time as a metaphor to relay the basics of human time. Some of the most popular children’s books narrate human life span in parallel to that of a tree or an environment of trees. The Giving Tree tells of a character named Boy who has a profound friendship with a tree, providing him with branches to swing from, apples to sell, a house to build from her branches, and even wood for a boat, in all stages of throughout his life. [4] After building the boat, there is nothing but a stump left of the once-regal tree. After each act of giving, it is written, the tree was happy. The book is used in religious circles as proof of the unconditional love of deities, and in just about every other circle, including pedagogical ones, as a textbook example of relationships that are fundamentally unreciprocal, dependent, and exploitative. We know how to extract from trees – but could find ways here to bring something back to the trees that nurture us?
We have a deep, ancestral connection to taking care of trees, and being taken care of by trees. We appreciate them not just for the view they give us from our home or office, but also from a deeper memory of the use of their shade, their cover from the weather, and their fruits. Unlike animals, who we consider to be competition, we are in close relation to plants and trees. We may envy their longer lifespan, yet this longer lifespan also allows us to see our own life as a smaller part of a longer lineage. This is why we call them ‘family trees’; we relate the lives of our direct families to those trees who have been silently in the presence of our ancestors. This is also why the community rallies around the protection of trees when they’re threatened; the term ‘tree hugger’, in fact, comes from such an attempt to save trees from being cut down, in 1730s India.[5]
To live without trees could even be to deny yourself of your life’s lineage. Another children’s book – The House Held Up By Trees – spells out the fate of those who don’t allow trees in their vicinity. Like the Giving Tree, the book follows a person during their entire life span and relates that span to trees around them, tying the time of human life expectancy to the experience of tree time. It tells the story of a man who buys a house to live in with his two young children, where he maintains a meticulous lawn, where no trees can root from. But when the children have left home, and the man desires to sell the house in order to live in the city closer to them, there are no prospective buyers, and the house falls into disrepair. The old man, not being able to keep up with the home’s deficits, is eventually lifted up – home and all – by the trees that uproot its foundations. Lawns are a testament to a middle class, continuously laboured life; yet trees are a testament to life according to a set of rules that doesn’t centre our experiences, but instead guards histories and legacies.
Cities grow around trees, which become bearers of knowledge and narratives of human presence. In Ljubljana’s botanical gardens, I encounter its oldest tree, a 211-year old Cornwall Cherry with many trunks and branches aiming to catch the sunrays across the path. The premises of the institution, buildings, paths, and flowerbeds grew around this tangled being. This tree comes with its own myths. A fox and a bear who encountered the tree in early spring, in bloom. The bear waits by the tree for it to bear fruit. The fox goes on its way looking for other fruit trees. The bear waits and waits for the fruits – but nothing comes. When the fox returns, in autumn, well fed on a variety of things, the bear is not so lucky. The moral of the story is a simple way to relay knowledge about the timing of the harvest: the trees that bloom earliest, bear fruit the latest. The fable about this tree marks its presence throughout the centuries. It’s a memory device for us to understand our relationships with the tree – and a fable that has become a founding myth of a creature outlasting us by many generations.
A city is an entity that radically reorganises all life within it according to human scale. This is one of the main takeaways from meeting Maja Simonetti, who has been invited as part of the summer lab. Simonetti has been a landscape designer in Ljubljana for over 30 years, and has an extensive knowledge of the history, inventory, health and management of trees in the city. The trees we’re sitting under, she tells us, predate the buildings around us – the paved streets, the small park, and even the cultural institution grew around them. The trees lining the street perpendicular to the plaza, however, stand no such chance. Urban trees have an expected lifespan of ten to fifteen years, after which their exhausted stems give in, prone to disease. They’re lucky to survive the first few years. They suffer from the lack of natural water systems, poor quality of soil, winter salting of the streets and bad air quality; but their main issue is the lack of space. As much as 30% of new trees die in their first year. Many new trees are constrained at the root in their pots, and since the tree from its foot to its canopy mirrors its abilities to grow underneath the ground, they do nothing but stay small. Potted, separated trees are dying at high rates, in every city in Europe. Here, the ‘wood wide web’ is exhaustingly constricted. And although a view on a tree is one of the most highly valued traits of urban life, trees are also considered a danger to built environment itself. Paradoxically, the ability of trees to draw near to housing is now wholly dependent on their solitude as potted beings, lowering their chances of survival. The big trees we know in our cityscapes now could have only been planted when the urban conditions were not adversely affecting their wellbeing. And so the city is a machine, a complex, a network that works to radically restructure the life of trees to approximate that of humans: nearer to the human body in size due to its subterranean strangulation; nearer to the human time of 4-year political cycles than the potentiality of trees to live for hundreds of years. In our current way of living according to tree time in urban environments, we are not allowing the possibilities of knowledge transfer that trees can imbue, which would reflect our own image as part of a longer lineage back to us.
There are a few terms that operate as rhetorical devices which are instrumentalised politically to undercut trees natural movements in the city: ‘native’ or ‘indigenous’; and ‘invasive’. These terms need to be problematised in this context. Speaking of plants ‘indigenous’ to Europe needs to take into account the history of human exchange of seeds and plants that has happened in Europe for hundreds of years. The history of the extraction of plants and seeds as part of the violent colonisation of elsewhere is in fact be one of the histories most indigenous to Europe. Furthermore, the term ‘native’ can easily be co-opted as a plant analogue to human movement; a group of self-proclaimed ‘nativists’ in the forest reserve Turnhout who claim the area as their ‘ancestral lands’, deny the right of ‘non-native’ northern pine trees to stand on Belgian soil. Claims to plant nativism are a transparent mirror of political ideologies about migration and cultural production, rather than a project of the conditions of common land or ancestry. Similarly, the term ‘invasive’ casts a judgment on a species’ properties rather than humans’ faults in their movement and management of the plant for their own purposes. Hogweed, for instance, spread throughout Ljubljana as it was unable to be contained by the botanical gardens, where it was first planted. ‘Invasive’ as a term essentially shifts the blame, assigning character flaws in tree species for management problems that only exist because they don’t fit the planned destination of certain environments, especially urban ones.
Trees are events in nonhuman scale. Any attempt to integrate them into the urban landscape is at the same time a bringing closer to the scale of human life. In that sense, a city to a tree is a bit like what a zoo is to an animal: zoos are environments that drastically prolong the natural lifespan of many kinds of animals held within them. In that, they resemble more of the age-old care humans need by the end of their life. Trees, on the other hand, are radically constricted in their size and life span by the city, tied more closely to the political cycles of urban planning. Human life is a machine that subsumes all other firms of life to more closely resemble its own principles of organisation – culturally, politically, socially. The callousness with which humans approach other forms of life is testified by urban trees. Yet trees resist; they persevere even on salty, cold roads, in restricted, concrete pots.
In 2020, playwright Topher Payne released a remake of the Giving Tree, named The Tree Who Set Healthy Boundaries. [6] It starts off with the same pages, but deviates as the Boy comes to the tree to cut their branches to build a house. ‘Look’, says the tree, ‘I was fine with giving you apples, but I am not giving you a house… Boy, I love you like family, but I am not going down like that.’ By the end of the alternative version, the Boy and the tree collaborate, making the best apple pies in town. While the tree becomes one of the strongest and healthiest trees in the forest, she even becomes acquainted to his children and grandchildren. It is a great reworking that foregrounds the resistance of trees. In the morality tale of the twenty-first century, the tree has been reconceptualised to have the kind of agency that would allow it to voice their worries about their relationship to our lineage. At the end of the day, with the constricted scale of urban trees, it is us who are missing out on reflecting on our lives according to the decelerated rhythm of tree time.
Ljubljana’s oldest tree stands in front of hostel Dod Lipo – literally, ‘under the linden trees’. The city has grown around this being here. They are now a lone linden, a new tree shooting from the hollow core where their rings used to be, at 400 years old. When this tree was 12, Galilei was sentenced by the inquisition for his claim that the Earth was not a planet central to the universe; when this tree is already around the age of 300, Bertolt Brecht writes his poem ‘to those born after us’ in exile. ‘What kind of times are these, when to talk about trees is almost a crime, for it is a kind of silence about injustice!’ [7] Now celebrating its 400th birthday, over bubbly wine and raspberry cake, it is time for a toast: may your offspring spread themselves far and wide across many different landscapes, after even you are gone; may your sons and daughters have the same longevity of life as you, testifying silently to every change around them: and may they shape cities, roads, and buildings according to their roots, trunks, and canopies, commanding the space they deserve at their own pace. If we were to be a bit mindful of the intergenerational timespan of trees’ lives, it would reflect in the continuity of the urban environment left for those born after us. For a life according to tree time can remind us to connect us to lineages beyond the span of our own life, allow us to take in knowledge not conveyed otherwise, and reflect our impact on the environment we build for ourselves. Life along tree time can reflect our own silent resistance.
Summerlab Observants
Lua Vollaard wrote this text on the occasion of the 2021 ACT Summerlab in Ljubljana. As independent observant she was invited to participate in the Summerlab, and asked to create a critical reflection, based on the Summerlab’s programme, participating artists and its social and ecological context. The Summerlab programme was organized by ACT-partner Bunkero and can be found here.
Lua Vollaard is a curator, researcher and writer, connected to Stroom Den Haag and Eindhoven Design Academy’s Critical Enquiry Lab.
