Trees Who Keep Time
A photo essay from a recent art show
In the Fall of 2015, tree planting season, the year my grandpa Dick died,
We planted a grove of over 200 Bald Cypress trees in a hollow on the tree farm in his memory.
The farm is on the edge of the range of Bald Cypresses, outside of Springfield, Missouri.
The range is growing as these trees migrate North with the warming winters.
An ice storm had killed most of the Oaks, Hickories, and Walnuts there.
So we cleared the limbs and dead trees and burned the wood in piles.
I laid the Grove out in curved squares of ten by ten foot spacing.
In the coming years, you’ll be able to see tall red-grey columns,
Orange carpeted floors,
And an emerald and blue ceiling.
This is the hope.
It’s good to be thoughtful about planting Bald Cypresses
For in parts of the North American continent they can live for 1,000 or 2,000 years. Some much older.
Since our language and culture is so transitory for someone like a Bald Cypress, I began to be concerned about how we might help these trees reach their full age.
In a thousand years, who will remember?
Let’s try this:
Begin with a way of keeping time that is outside the normal grid.
Not marked by a “tick-tock” or the turning over of a new calendar - that’s too short!
How about a clock where our steps,
our memories and stories,
and the growth of the branches of a tree tells us when we are,
who we are,
whose we are.
What mechanism does this kind of clock take?
Let’s start with a path that winds its way in and around the Grove.
Every so often there’s a station, marked with a sculpture, perhaps.
At each station, or sculpture, the participant is invited to pause and look around
at the trees,
at the seasons,
the seasons of their own life.
And what if they returned each year to the same path, the same stations?
And what if their children and grand children
And their great great grand children returned and walked the same path?
Asked the same questions?
By the same trees?
For a thousand years?
This kind of clock would take more than metal and plastic.
It would need us to wind it with our steps.
Walk with me down the green path.
Will
Summer, 2025
Text and photos from my work in the show “Unboxed: Rethinking the Grid,” curated by Erin Tyler, Colby Jennings, and Jodi McCoy.
Missouri State University, Brick City Gallery
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