MEMORY OF TREES
MEMORY OF TREES 0.0 is site specific installation that compares climate data collected by humans with climate records preserved in trees, presented as a participatory climate maze. The project originated in response to the devastating storm that struck Fauquier County in July 2022, leaving hundreds of trees destroyed. Trees act as natural archives of climate: their rings reveal yearly variations in drought, abundance, fire, and flood. When combined with human records, they provide layered insight into environmental change across centuries.
For this work, I visualized 120 years of July climate data for Fauquier County (NOAA, Virginia). Using mulch from fallen trees at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation airstrip, I constructed concentric circles of mulch to represent precipitation, with each ring marking 12 years. Starting at the outer ring (2021), visitors navigated inward to the center, where a stump of Celtis occidentalis marked “ground zero,” or 1901, offering a point of comparison between tree-ring data and human records. The maze’s openings and dead ends were shaped by 120 years of U.S. environmental legislation, both supportive and obstructive. To preserve a memory of fallen trees I hand-made paper and used local walnut ink to print the image of the stump,
The project serves as a draft for future installments across USA.