Jill Jonnes - Urban Forests: A Natural History of Trees and People in the American Cityscape

We Appreciate the Symmetry of Human and Sylvan Life

Graft by sculptor Roxy Paine at the National Gallery of Art on the Mall in Washington, D.C. (Photograph courtesy of Steve Lagerfeld.)

The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

O n a May morning in Washington, D.C., a middle-aged male tourist wearing plaid shirt, tan shorts, and Birkenstock sandals wanders into the National Gallery of Arts outdoor sculpture garden by the Mall, stops, and begins angling his big-lensed Nikon camera this way and that. He backs up, steps to one side, and clicks away at artist Roxy Paines forty-five-foot-tall silver tree, shimmering against a blue sky. Graft is an eight-ton polished-stainless-steel sculpture that towers above the manicured lawns and gravel paths, one bare silvered limb extending lithely up into an airy tangle of branches and twigs while the second large branch (grafted on?) reaches skyward, heavy and gnarled. A grackle lands on one of the uppermost metabranches, reconsiders, and takes off.

This faux city tree is a showstopper, its enormity and gleaming beauty eclipsing the gardens honey locust trees and other pieces of modern art. Its like something out of a fairy tale, says a young mother standing hand in hand with her two-year-old girl, both contemplating the sculpture. In the original Grimm brothers version of Cinderella, the mother explains, it is not a fairy godmother who grants Cinderella her wishes but a tree that grows on her mothers grave. In my minds eye, that tree was always silver.

A piece of art at once so close to nature and yet so metallic and shiny provokes reactions. For Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik, Paines piece has the strangest effect: Its grander and more impressive than the live trees already in the garden, but also so much deader. The trees, in a sense, critique the human artifice, Thats the best you can do? But the art also seems to flatter trees we might otherwise ignoreI wish I could be live like you, says the stainless steel version.

Roxy Paine assembled the tree, the sixteenth in his Dendroid series, with his crew in November of 2009. They pulled up with three flatbed trucks carrying thirty-seven different components and soldered, fitted, and adjusted, often working like arborists from bucket trucks. The stainless-steel tree grew taller in the fall air, its thick trunk convincingly misshapen, its branches realistically windswept and wild. In a matter of days Graft achieved a size that in nature would require decades, and an instant celebrity bestowed upon few city trees.

Take a diagonal walk across the Mall toward the Smithsonian Castle, and before you stands a worthy rival to the gleaming Graft, a large and architecturally striking American elm, the iconic American tree Ulmus americana, a forest dwellerturnedurbanite beloved as no other tree in our history. We had rather walk beneath an avenue of elms than inspect the noblest cathedral that art ever accomplished, proclaimed Henry Ward Beecher, nineteenth-century abolitionist and preacher. Like the young American nation, the elm tree was fast-growing and flourished in the toughest city soils and settings. In time the elms became long-lived wonders, their high, arching branches and lordly architecture perfect for urban streets and parks.

The National Mall is lined on both sides with twin elm alles, and the standout among those six hundred trees is a living sculpture, the Jefferson Elm. It hews to the apparent rule that classic American elms must have patriotic appellations, though it possesses no plaque to make itself known to passersby. Its name is fitting, for Thomas Jefferson, our third president, cherished old trees, denouncing their destruction as a crime little short of murder. During Jeffersons tenure in the White House, poachersthese midnight predatorsrustled a grove of seventy towering tulip poplars from District of Columbia public land to sell as firewood. Furious, the president declared at a dinner party: The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the growth of centuries... pains me to an unspeakable degree.

The Jefferson Elm, planted more than eighty years ago as the Depression set in, today has a massive pillarlike trunk that rises straight up thirty feet, supporting the muscular forking branches that then spiral sinuously toward the heavens, where on a sunny day its million leaves create a luminous canopy of lime green light and shadows. The arboreal embodiment of power and civic grandeur, it was witness to the departure of the nations troops during World War II and their victorious return, to the sonorous roll of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s I have a dream speech in 1963, and to demonstrations of every political stripe. A sentinel to the inaugurations of thirteen presidents, it could easily be present at another fifty such ceremonies.

If we had X-ray vision, or if the Jefferson Elm were sheathed not in furrowed grayish bark but in some kind of wondrous see-through glass, this tree would easily eclipse the shiny silver allure of