With the imminent transformation of the East Campus
at Washington University, this project-based investigation
of is structured around an historical and ecological analysis
of a pin-oak allée. This project examines our local landscape
and resource legacy, offering insight into the greater meaning
of trees in our urban ecosystem.
Beginning with one tree, this project bore an understanding
of the community of trees, and an interrogation into ways that
our landscape imaginaries can be tuned to embrace arboreal
collectivity. The allée became a laboratory: asking questions of
the trees, questions of their context, and questions of ourselves.
Working with arborists, ecologists, landscape architects, sculptors,
dendrochronologists and artists, students interrogated the many
meanings of one tree-from root to crown, from microbial sub-soil
cultures to species habitats in its highest branches, from the
monoculture of the 43 tree allée, to the diverse community beyond.
The project was capped by a ritual felling of a single tree in
advance of the campus transformation, with this One Tree returning
to the new landscape as a nurse log in 2019.
