Trees in the city

I’ve been walking in the centre of Grenoble and on the university campus for a lot of this week, looking at the trees and how they are living. The campus is huge and the trees there are generally given a lot of space and planted in grassy areas (though still often quite isolated – one or two outside each building). There’s also a lovely arboretum.

The city centre is quite different – there are a lot of trees, but many of them are very contained, either within high-sided beds or railings (sometimes) or in the case of young trees, lots of protective sheathing and fencing. It’s quite hard to get near some of them – I’m used to being able to touch trees, which is one of the ways I greet and get to know them, and it’s not always easy here. The trees are also very often completely blocked in by parked cars (in car parks), street infrastructure etc. And they’re quite often used in what seems to me a possibly harming (or at least uncaring) way e.g. to hang cables from (or even, as in the image, to mount this box – CCTV? lighting? on a horse chestnut in the main square in the centre.

I’m working on identifying which species are planted (which is harder because it’s winter). I know some, but am hoping to get help from the municipality with information on what is planted. I’m planning to work on a kind of experiential mapping of the ones I visit.

This project has grown out of a longer project I began in 2018, the Street Tree Twinning Project (STTP). I’d been wanting to do some work around street trees for a long time – living in London, they are a real resource for me and I wanted to bring attention to them and honour them. Street trees tend to be isolated from one another, rather than living in community as most trees do in their original habitats, with their roots entangled in infrastructure (cables, pipes etc.), in often compacted soil, and subject to pollution, vandalism and littering. The aim of STTP is to create symbolic links between street trees, to make a sort of virtual community but also to draw attention to their presence as beings in the city. I’ve twinned trees within London, and between London and Gravesend, so far using laminated bark rubbings (the rubbings are exchanged between the tree ‘twins’, as above. But I’m not happy with these because of the plastic, and because attaching them with drawing pins (as I have in some cases) damages the tree. I’m working on some ideas for more sustainable markers, and part of the project of this residency is to explore materials like clay, printing on fabric or some more sustainable way of making the paper rubbings weatherproof.