Name: Field Trip: How to Read a Forest at Deepdene Park
Start: 2026-04-12T10:00:00-04:00
End: 2026-04-12T11:30:00-04:00
Location: Deepdene Park

Field Trip: How to Read a Forest at Deepdene Park

Join artist Heather Bird Harris and tree-lover Eli Dickerson for an immersive walk through Atlanta’s Deepdene Forest, home to the city’s oldest known white oak tree. This experience invites participants to slow down and observe how forests tell their own stories through soil horizons, over/understories, and interspecies entanglement over time. Together, Harris and Dickerson weave art, ecology, and history to explore how forests record the rhythms of change and disruption. Participants will learn to “read” the forest as a living archive of time and relationship, expanding their sense of place and kinship with the more-than-human world.
This event is part of a series. Learn more here about the first event of this series: Using Art + Science to Read the Stories Hidden in Atlanta’s Tree Rings (Wed April 1st at 7pm).
Harris's collaboration with Clay Tucker and Eli Dickerson informed her solo exhibition, How We Hold the Weather. The exhibition features paintings, photography, and film, and will open at the Welch Gallery at Georgia State University on April 2, from 5-8 pm.
About the Instructors:
Heather Bird Harris is an artist, education leader, and independent curator. Her work explores the throughlines between history and ecological crises, engaging with communities, scientists, and place-based research to investigate possibilities for emergence and systems change.
Eli Dickerson is the Director of Education at Park Pride & has been a fixture in the environmental world in Atlanta, GA, since 2005. He has a passion for native plants, championing trees, and habitat restoration/preservation. He loves leveraging his skills to address intersectional environmental issues while working to educate park goers, and also preserve and activate local parks.
View our full Calendar of Events at treesatlanta.org/calendar.