About this Event
This is an in-person event only.
Trees have always featured prominently in global cultures, even as they were part of movement of goods and economy worldwide. The tree was, and is, celebrated in books and poems, it features in paintings and decorative arts. The unremitting erasure of wild spaces and biodiversity has triggered an emotional response to deforestation and also the cutting down of individual trees. Entire communities have come together to protect trees in Sheffield or in Plymouth, and to bitterly condemn the mowing down of the Sycamore Gap Tree in September 2023.
This conference, organised collaboratively between Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the Linnean Society of London, looks back at the place of trees in global culture (trees in popular literature and arts): why do they hold such a special place in our culture? How has this been expressed through words and paintings? It will also look at how our gaze upon trees has transformed, with the realisation that trees are instrumental to our sense of belonging, well-being and happiness, and will look at the influence of other societies that have looked at and looked after trees in different ways.
The day meeting will constitute three panels through the day (scroll further down for talk abstracts) —
Cultural Significance: Trees in Art and Literature
Amanda Davis “Percy Bysshe Shelleys's Trees and the Poiesis of Place”
Kate Teltscher "The High Priest of the Vegetable World: Amherstia nobilis in British Literature and Art”
Paul Dobraszczyk "Dancing in the trees: From The Baron in the Trees to Go Ape!"
Well-Being and Healing
Lewis Daly "The Spectral Forest: Arboreal Engagements in the Amazonian Anthropocene"
Madison Miller "The Role of Trees in Promoting Relaxation: Exploring the Wind in Trees Soundscape"
Alison Dyke TBC
Cultural Emblems
Maria Kennedy "Exploring Uncultivation in the American Northeast: Wild Orchards and Social and Horticultural Networks of Innovation"
Robert Balogh "The Roles of Robinia pseudocacacia in Budapest"
Heather Craddock "Empire Forestry in Colonial Jamaica: The Absence and Agency of the Ackee Tree"
Keynote speaker TBA
All the panels will be followed by a Q&A session, and the day's proceedings will end with a wine reception at the Linnean Society's library. You will also have an opportunity to visit the special exhibition at the Society on tree and cultures stories "Lovely as a Tree" (On till July 28, 2024).
Please buy the concession ticket only if you fulfil any of the below criteria.
⁃ 65 years of age, or over
⁃ Currently in receipt of UK government benefit (including, but not limited to, Income Based Jobseeker's Allowance, Income-related Employment and Support Allowance, Income Support, Working Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit and Housing Benefit, and Universal Credit)
⁃ Currently in full-time education.
Cover image: Sycamore Gap Tree by (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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Talk abstracts
| Percy Bysshe Shelleys's Trees and the Poiesis of Place
In drawing attention to the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s figures of trees—both visual and verbal—this paper explores the poet’s real arboreal encounters from places as diverse as the Borghese Gardens of Rome, the Cascine pine forest near Pisa, and the chestnut trees of Switzerland, to the familiar beech groves of Bisham on the Thames, alongside his imagined treescapes that gather diverse tree species in verse. For example, Shelley’s early poem, Alastor (1816), imagines a biodiverse treescape of oak, beech, cedar, ash, and acacia in ‘close union’. This ‘close union’, later described in The Sensitive Plant (1820) as a ‘mutual atmosphere’, points up Shelley’s arboreal affinities.
Shelley’s trees branch throughout his various forms of composition, from the Gilpinesque landscape drawings of trees in his Genevan and Italian notebooks, to rhetorical figures within his poems, to descriptions of trees observed in letters, and within the list of Alpine seeds that the poet intended to cultivate in his garden in Marlow. Trees—real and imagined—are vital to Shelley’s poetry. This paper will explore how the poet’s figures of diverse tree species and their interrelationships with one another and their surrounding environs speak to the Romantic plant’s indeterminate category and to contemporary ecological interests.
The High Priest of the Vegetable World: Amherstia nobilis in British Literature and Art
Among the botanic spoils of the First Anglo-Burmese war (1824-6), none was more spectacular than the Thaw ka-gyi tree or Amherstia nobilis. Nathaniel Wallich first encountered the tree, with its cascading scarlet blossoms, during a survey of newly acquired Burmese territory in 1827. He gave it pride of place in his lavish Plantae Asiaticae Rariores (1830-2). Unusually for a narrative of botanic ‘discovery’, the tree was encountered not in the wild, but in a Buddhist temple garden, and the religious association only boosted the tree’s cultural prestige.
This paper traces the history of Amherstia nobilis in Britain through its appearances in print and illustration. Particular attention is paid to the tree’s association with women – from its naming in honour of Countess Amherst and her daughter Lady Sarah Amherst, its successful cultivation by Louisa Lawrence, its wax modelling by Miss Tayspill, its depiction by Marianne North, and its fictionalisation by Anne Thackeray Ritchie.
| Dancing in the trees: From The Baron in the Trees to Go Ape!
Building a life in the trees might seem like an anachronous proposition for a bipedal species; yet it is clear that humans have long desired a closer engagement with these plants, perhaps most obviously displayed in the popular children’s pastime of tree-climbing. There’s an atavistic element to this - an imagined return to our evolutionary origins as tree-dwelling apes; but also a direct bodily identification with trees - our limbs multiplied in theirs, inviting a direct correspondence between one organism and another.
This paper explores both speculative and real-life bodily engagements with trees, beginning with Italo Calvino’s playful novel The Baron in the Trees (1957). A utopian counter to the rapid industrialisation seen in post-war Italy, Calvino’s novel imagines an aristocratic heir forsaking his earth-bound duties for a life of liberty in the trees. The paper links Calvino’s fantasia with architectural appropriations of trees in folk rituals, focusing on celebrations in Bavaria known as Tanzlinden (‘dance linden’) where villagers assemble each year around a local linden (lime) tree to dance. Featuring sometimes multilevel platforms constructed within the branches of trees, these rituals originated in the 17th century as local markers of wider social change. Like Calvino’s fantasia, they represent specific ways in which human politics and trees have become conjoined.
The final part of the paper considers how contemporary variants of tree dancing have tended to hollow-out these overtly political meanings. Here I reflect on my own experience of Go Ape!, a UK adventure sports company that creates structures in trees to facilitate human movement. What might it mean to Go Ape! beyond mere thrill-seeking?
| The Spectral Forest: Arboreal Engagements in the Amazonian Anthropocene
This paper will explore relationships with trees among the indigenous Makushi people of Amazonian Guyana. As a forest-dwelling people, trees have great ecological, cultural, and spiritual significance for the Makushi. The paper will examine Makushi sylvan knowledge and relationships along two interrelated planes: first, the spiritual ecology of trees, including several prominent arboreal spirits (mariwa) that inhabit trees and present considerable danger to human beings when hunting or gardening in the rainforest; and second, the political ecology of trees in the context of deforestation for mining and agribusiness in what I term the Amazonian Anthropocene. As I will show, the agency of these arboreal spirits and associated shamanic practices exists in a shifting “friction” (Tsing 2005) with the political economy of resource extractivism, development, and conservation in the Guyanese Amazon today. In investigating these “cosmopolitical” (De la Cadena 2015) tensions, I will attempt to unlayer vernacular notions of growth, vitality, life, and death which permeate the indigenous forest-scape and invest it with meaning. Thinking through trees (their liveliness, temporalities, social lives, and contested meanings) across this divide may open up new understandings of indigenous cosmovisions in the critical context of the Amazonian Anthropocene.
Madison Miller "The Role of Trees in Promoting Relaxation: Exploring the Wind in Trees Soundscape"
Trees play a critical role in shaping the visual landscape of a place, but they also contribute significantly to the soundscape of an environment. As researchers and practitioners increasingly recognize the importance of nature sounds in promoting relaxation, it is important to consider the unique contribution of trees in creating these soundscapes. In this presentation, we will explore the Wind in Trees soundscape and its potential to promote meditation and relaxation.
My PhD research in nature soundscapes has shown that exposure to natural sounds can promote relaxation and reduce stress. In my work, I have focused on the Wind in Trees soundscape, which is a unique and powerful nature sound that can transport us to a state of calm and tranquility. By listening to the wind in the leaves, we can connect with nature and find peace in the present moment. Listen here:
In this presentation, I will share my reflection on the Wind in Trees soundscape and its potential to promote relaxation. I will discuss the creative practice as well as the science behind the benefits of natural sounds, and how the Wind in Trees soundscape specifically can help people find a sense of calm and focus. I will also share practical tips for incorporating the Wind in Trees soundscape into everyday life, and for using this soundscape for meditation and relaxation.
Overall, this presentation will offer valuable insights into the role of trees in promoting relaxation, and will provide participants with practical tools for incorporating natural sounds into their daily lives.
TBA
| Exploring Uncultivation in the American Northeast: Wild Orchards and Social and Horticultural Networks of Innovation
In 2019, American cider maker and orchardist Andy Brennan published Uncultivated: Wild Apples, Real Cider, and the Complicated Art of Making a Living, in which he describes his ideology of “uncultivation”, privileging the discovery, care, use, and propagation of wild apples in the reforested areas of his region of upstate New York.
Brennan’s ideas have contributed to a groundswell of enthusiasm for apple foraging in the region in recent years. Cider producers in the emergent American cider industry have begun searching for remnant orchards of abandoned farms and the feral offspring of cultivated trees now scattered in second growth forests across the American Northeast. There is increasing interest in the significance of wild apples as sources of potential new cultivars that are disease resistant, locally adapted to climate change, and expansive in qualities of taste and use in cider.
Our ethnographic and horticultural research with foragers reveals foraging as an “indicator arena” where both cultural and biological resources are in flux in vernacular, citizen science networks of experimentation. In their search for “uncultivated” trees, foragers are exploring emergent pathways for interconnected social and biological change as they re-evaluate the materials resources and social histories of the American landscape.
Drawing on ethnographic interviews with participants, this paper will highlight the diverse motivations of apple foragers, with a particular focus on the relationships people form with the trees and the aesthetic, culinary, and horticultural choices guiding their selection and propagation of specimens.
| The Roles of Robinia pseudocacacia in Budapest
The tree species Robinia pseudoacacia (black locust in English, fehér akác in Hungarian) played a key role in afforestation efforts of the late 19th and early 20th century. By the early 21st century Robinia pseudocacia became one of the most invasive as well as most cultivated tree species in Hungary covering around 400 000 hectares.
In the 1920s, József Ernyey – a polymath – began his quest for the European history of the species in a courtyard of Banloc in today’s Romania where the Robinia pseudacacia trees were supposedly planted in the mid-18th century on the orders of the Habsburg government. The first part of the paper will show that while conducting his research Ernyey produced an unintended post-colonial critique of European science. He found that despite what the Linnean taxonomy suggests, it is highly unlikely that black locust was present in Jean Robin’s plant collection around 1600. This falsified tradition sheds light on how uncertain the actual knowledge of Renaissance European scientists, and that respect paid to key figures of small circles could result in false information survive centuries. Moreover, Ernyey pointed out the link between science, indigenous knowledge, the environmental impact of the struggle for geopolitical supremacy and the growing importance of black locust in Europe.
The second part of the paper demonstrates that another time capsule, a tree that probably appears in the book of registry on the trees planted in Budapest between cc. 1850 and 1930, helps us to go beyond the current state of the debate about the usefulness of black locust. Indeed, the species appeared in a variety of niches in the largest city of mid-19th century Hungary, Pest-Buda (the would-be Budapest).
| Empire Forestry in Colonial Jamaica: The Absence and Agency of the Ackee Tree
This paper will explore archival records held at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew to establish a narrative of colonial forestry in nineteenth century Jamaica. Against this backdrop of Empire Forestry and increasing concern about the impact of deforestation on the island, one tree began its journey towards bearing the national fruit of Jamaica. A monument to the people enslaved on the grounds of the University of the West Indies campus in Kingston, Jamaica, acknowledges that groves of ackee trees act as ‘botanical markers’ of former slave villages. This use of the ackee tree as a long-term memorial of enslavement exemplifies the role of trees as sites of cultural memory and how ackee became the principal botanical symbol of Jamaican identity. However, there is scarcely any discussion of ackee in Kew’s archives. I will argue that this absence is the result of the tree’s long association with resistance to colonial exploitation. Drawing on representations of ackee in art and literature helps to fill these archival absences and uncover the cultural history of a tree bearing a potentially poisonous fruit, growing beyond the colonial spaces of the plantation and botanical garden.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Linnean Society of London, Piccadilly, London, United Kingdom
GBP 15.00 to GBP 25.00
