My project Tree Care Hyde Park, public art for trees and their neighbors, launches in two weeks! I’m writing to share about the project with you and invite you to a series of events I’m offering this fall.

Apologies if you also received this by email. I’m trying to cover all my bases and going forward you will not get any duplicate newsletters!

Rooted in place and shaped by community, the public art project Tree Care Hyde Park celebrates and expands the community of care between urban trees and their human neighbors in Hyde Park through a series of community workshops, textile tree tags, and a mobile printing/planting press.

How can you join in?

Attend the opening celebration: Saturday September 12, 3:00-5:00pm

Park Library Garden, 35 Harvard Avenue, Hyde Park (map)

Join the artist and civic and community organization leaders to celebrate the opening of Tree Care Hyde Park: a public art project this fall in Hyde Park that celebrates and expands the community of care between trees and their human neighbors.

Free to attend and open to the public. Parking is available at the city lot on Harvard Avenue and the session is accessible via the Fairmount or Hyde Park Commuter Rail stations.

Rain date: Saturday 9/26, 3:00-5:00pm

. . . . . . . .

Wander the green spaces of Hyde Park to find the tree tags (see the interactive map to find them)

. . . . . . . .

Join a tree tag writing/printing workshop (all in Hyde Park)

Thursday September 10, 6:00-7:30pm, at the Hyde Park Library,

35 Harvard Avenue, Hyde Park register

Friday September 18, 5:30-7:00pm at Dell Rock Urban Wild

40 Dell Avenue, Hyde Park register

Tuesday October 6, 6:00-7:30pm at The Pryde

59 Harvard Avenue, Hyde Park register

Free and open to all, registration required

. . . . . . . .

Signup for a free tree and make tree tags with Tree Care Hyde Park

with Keep Hyde Park Beautiful and Tree Boston

Saturday, September 26, 10:00-12:00pm

Hyde Park Library, 35 Harvard Avenue, Hyde Park

(for Hyde Park residents)

. . . . . . . .

Visit the Project Hub at the Everett Square Theater foyer

to see the Tree Care Printing/Planting Press and map of all the sites

11 Fairmount Avenue, Hyde Park (google map location)

. . . . . . . .

Find out about more events at the project website

Project background

I’ve been working on projects with and about urban trees for years, so this opportunity to create a project in my home neighborhood of Hyde Park is a dream. I discovered that Hyde Park has one of the quickest decreasing tree canopies in the city of Boston, mostly due to aging trees and rampant development. I wanted to create a project that would connect residents with their tree neighbors, to help them to get to know them as kin. I often feel this project at its core provides experiences to learn about (and hopefully join) the work of so many amazing community organizations in Hyde Park working to preserve and plant trees.

What and where?

The project consists of a 1000 intimate encounters with trees throughout Hyde Park; as residents walk their dogs, commute to work, relax in their local parks, they will see brightly colored, plant-dyed textiles tags printed with short texts in the form of multi-sensory invitations to get to know and commune with our tree neighbors. The tags include a link to an extensive website: A Field Guide to the Trees of Hyde Park, with information about the trees and the project.

The project centers around community workshops that invite us to dream together with the trees: what do they hope for us and what do we hope for them? Community members will be guided through writing prompts using ink made from the trees of Hyde Park, which we can then print using the mobile printing/planting press to make their own tree tags. Participants are invited to take a tag and hang it on a tree in their yard, street, or park, which will then be logged on an interactive map of all the trees tagged as part of the project.

The Tree Care Planting/Printing Press is a mobile printing press in the form of a wheelbarrow and will be installed in the foyer of the historic Everett Square Theater in Logan Square, Hyde Park, when it is not in use during events.

Thanks
This project was incubated in the Boston Public Art Triennial’s Accelerator Program. Heartfelt thanks to the team there, particularly Jasper Sanchez and Amor Díaz-Campos. So many artists, friends, family, neighbors, and amazing folks joined with me in the making of this project over the past year, and will continue to shape it with me throughout the fall. I am always grateful to my tree companions who have provided guidance and companionship throughout the process.

Newsletter

Please subscribe to my monthly newsletter: studiojane.substack.com to get project updates, learn about events and how to join in, and read about trees, kinship, ink making, resilience, and community efforts to preserve and protect trees in Boston and Hyde Park.

Subscribe now

Hope to see you this fall! Come to an event or just reach out to go for a walk or picnic with me in the green spaces of Hyde Park

--Jane

Tree Care Hyde Park, a public art project for trees and their neighbors sited in the southernmost neighborhood of Boston, Hyde Park, will launch the week of September 10, 2026 with a series of public events for the community including writing and printing with trees, tree plantings, tree walks, and tree giveaways.

Hyde Park’s urban tree canopy, so essential to our health and joy, is declining more quickly than any other neighborhood in Boston. Aging trees, tons of development, and changes in land use are driving this decrease, but community organizations are on it, doing incredible work to preserve and plant trees.

Tree Care Hyde Park will tag 1000 trees throughout Hyde Park with colorful plant-dyed textile tags printed with invitations to get to know the trees as our neighbors and kin. Find them as you walk to work, take an evening stroll with your dog, or have a picnic in a local green space. This dispersed public art project offers 1000 opportunities to befriend our local trees who do so much to care for us.

How can we care for them? What do they dream of? What do we dream of for them? What kind of activity would you like to do with them? Explore these questions and more at a series of community art workshops where we will learn about our tree friends, write our messages to them, and print them using a mobile printing/planting press in the form of a wheelbarrow.

The next newsletter will be out on August 26 and will share the website (with an interactive map to find all the tags), the dates, and how to register for all the events as well as how to can visit the project (hint: bring a picnic and discover one of Hyde Park’s beautiful and little known green spaces).

Look at this landscape of beautiful plant-dyed canvas sheets getting ready to be tree tags! Thanks to the amazing Jo Lobdell for her incredible work dying this fabric. And much gratitude to madder, weld, chamomile, lac, avocado, walnut, and more vegetal beings.

And many thanks now and more to come to the Boston Public Art Triennial Accelerator program for all the amazing resources, community and support!

Today I want to share a little about an upcoming gathering at a distance. On February 24, 2025 I’ll send out packages to those who sign up to join with Willow, me, and a small community of dreamers through the US Postal Service. You’ll get a link to an audio invitation and guiding narrative, some willow ink in clothlet form (more on that later), and a template oracle card.

The invitation begins:

“I invite you to join me with willow in this gathering this month that takes place across time and space with a group of people who hope to commune with willow. This short audio recording shares a little orientation to this gathering to begin and then guides you through an experience of getting to know and dreaming with willow. I invite you to find a willow friend and sit under their branches for a time, sensing into their movement, voice, and being. Or perhaps you can call up in your mind and senses a willow friend you have known. Can you feel the willow boughs as they shiver, bow, and flow in the breezes? Can you imagine their fibrous, vigorous, spreading roots so close to the surface? Can you sense their watery, light, supple bodies?

Lets take a deep breath in, and a deep breath out….“

The score for willow invites us to whisper our dreams to willow. There’s more in the invitation to guide you in the process, but that’s the core of the experience. The longer set of guidelines or suggestions are created to give us all some clues to how to communicate with our more-than-human kin, willow trees. What does it mean to listen to a plant? How can we be open to other voices, other ways of being? Is it possible to find small fissures in the smooth shell of our colonial imaginations? Can we put aside our rational western logic? Can we open our hearts in love to a vegetal being? Can we be porous in our bodies and senses to sylvan ways of being, knowing, communicating?

It takes time to unlearn the sensory gating cultivated by high capitalism. It takes time to reattune our bodies, senses, spirit, mind to our local ecologies/beings/time. It’s mysterious, stepping into unknowing, hard. But it is also healing, expansive, radical even…

I’ve been wandering and wondering in and through these questions for the last three years of this project. Drawing on the wisdom of so many: my own celtic ancestors (the Ogham!), scholars and poets of animism (David Abrams), spiritual traditions (Sufis), and so many more brilliant thinkers. Likely it would be useful to share a bibliography of the project at some point. But that bibliography would be so so incomplete. Because the most challenging, vulnerable, and slow learning has come through just being with the trees.

This morning I lay under a white ash tree in a fluffy snow drift as they sleep through the deep winter. I’m just getting to know ash, so I had few facts to clutter my brain and configure my expectations. I simply lay there, trying to open every pore, every sense, become like a cloud, or a sponge, or lichen, slow and absorbent. To put aside assumptions. To let my thoughts and questions drift in and out. And to peer at the edges of my consciousness for what was lurking there: images, sounds, colors, stories…. I found my imagination traveling deep into the tap roots of this 79 year old tree (check out this cool site on how to determine the age of trees), which are likely (I now know after looking it up later) 10-15 feet long and maybe 25 feet in diameter. I could feel a rumbling, like a loud very old furnace in an old New England house. A source of powerful, potent energy. An engine or source of power. I now can imagine the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi absorbing this energy and traveling it along their networks. I could imagine it coiled and waiting in this deep winter moment as the tree has slowed their growth and is protecting themselves from the cold. This is all to just share a process, which is taking steps into unknowing, into a beginner mind. Or trying to…

So, what does this all have to do with willow and a USPS gathering of Urban Tree Oracle with Willow? What could you expect to do, be, learn, know, share, sense? The Urban Tree Oracle gatherings create community, shared experience, linked knowing, through unexpected, sometimes unfamiliar, invitations. They take the form of scores, like recipes for doing something, like cooking, but weirder. All I can say about this invitation is that it has to do with dreams. You are invited to dream with willow.

From the story of Willow I shared with the score…

“Willow is fast growing and short lived. One of the earliest woody plants to leaf out in spring and last to drop leaves in autumn, they are a constant companion. Their tough roots spread wide and love to live in watery places. Along streams and creeks, their interlaced roots hold fast the soil of the banks, preventing erosion. Long, slender, drooping branches seem as if they are bent over in sadness, giving Willow the association of mourning and loss. They are pioneers, often one of the first to appear in a disturbed site, remediating the soil by drawing up toxins through their trunk. Their graceful, slender, pliable branches have been used for ages in all kinds of housewares and crafts, including boats, baskets, rope, wicker, and more. Because of their magical ability to regrow vigorously when cut and how they can root when just stuck in the soil, they have been used to make living hedges and homes. Their sap contains salicylic acid and has long been chewed to reduce pain and inflammation, a natural inspiration for the chemical form of salicylic acid, aspirin. Native Americans have often included willow in their tobacco blends because it is thought to be able to carry messages to the Great Spirit. Thanks to their love of water, folklore has long associated them with the moon, the feminine, and cycles. Divining rods are usually made from willow, allowing them to be a portal or amplifier of intuition and magic. In Europe, people have long whispered their dreams to the willows.”

The second part of the process is to create an oracle card using a template card printed with an image of willow bark that I am sending along with some willow ink in the form of a clothlet. The ink is made from fallen twigs, branches, and bark of a black willow living in a stream bed in Boston (specifically the streambed of Bussey Brook in The Arnold Arboretum). The pigment is infused into the enclosed clothlet, a small piece of cotton, which was commonly used in medieval times to allowed pigment to be easily stored and transported. The ink can be used by placing the clothlet in a small bowl and adding a very small amount of water (try a teaspoon to start) until the ink releases from the cloth into the water. I learned of this process from the incredible work of Artist and Wild Pigment Project founding director Tilke Elkins. If you don’t know her work, check it out here.

I’m sharing bits and pieces of this project over these newsletters, so you may be left with a lot of questions. What is an oracle card? Why urban trees? Etc. Subscribe to learn more as I share a couple times a season about the project.

So, this invitation is open from February 10-21. I have limited space for this, so reach out soon if you can. On February 24, I’ll send out the packages and invite you to join the gathering at a distance sometime between March 1-15. Let me know if you want to join by emailing me at janemarsching@gmail.com. Send me your address, phone number, and a hello.

See you with willow in our dreams.

Here is a thing I wrote in 2014: a letter to Hemlock and Woolly Adelgid, introducing them to each other and to me, cut out of a 120’ length of black nylon that flew as the tail of a 6’ black nylon kite over the meadows and forests of the Saint-Gauden’s landscape in New Hampshire:
In a forest deep with Hemlock and White Pine, sensing the scattering of the forest ants and the six-spotted tiger beetle in your leaf litter. Together we hear the purple finches and Eastern Towhees busy in your limbs. I see a wood turtle amble by, startling a blue-spotted salamander. You are central to all this, a foundation species, holding all these beings fast in interconnectedness too vast for us to unravel here. And yet it unravels.

And here is a thing I wrote in 2021 as part of inquiry and reflection prompts from a mind-expanding course I took called Vulture: Courting the Other/Wise in a Time of Breakdown:
I am in northern Vermont with almost no wifi, or I would send a picture or two of a baby Hemlock I came upon in the forest. Not the only one. This baby was nestled at the foot of a mother tree. I had been noticing that the Hemlocks had no or few cones in this part of the forest, tho nearby, there was one in more sun with tons of adolescent cones—light lovers. I had been thinking about migration and how Hemlock’s cast their cones in a smaller radius than many evergreens, so they spread much more slowly (but more densely?)… And here was a baby Hemlock, who we rarely see in Boston these days. I moved around this baby, in prayer, in protection, in connection. I crouched and gazed through the blueish light, listened in the windless grove, felt the cool damp….

And I’ve made ink with Hemlock for over a decade: from some fallen trunks at a superfund site in Concord, MA; from the forest in Vermont; from the slowly dying Hemlock in my front garden that I looked out on through the pandemic…

And when I first started to sit with Hemlock for this project in 2023, I wrote:

We can flourish like Hemlock when we are grounded in rich earth, 
when our limbs are flexible in adversity, 
when we offer shelter to others, when we reach for the light, 
when we balance between our masculine and feminine, 
when we find it hard to tolerate toxicity, 
when we are hopeful in the face of uncertainty, 
when we create our own forest of mystery.

I’m excited to share that I’ll be offering a winter solstice Urban Tree Oracle gathering with Hemlock in the dark at my studio on 12/21 at 5:30-7:30pm, register here. We will meet my Hemlock living in my front garden, sit together around a solstice fire, burn natural objects to become charcoal, participate in a guided meditation score written with artist Patte Loper, and draw with Hemlock to make our own oracle cards, distilled sparks of the experience we had with Hemlock to take with us.

I hope to see you there.

This newsletter shares the images, stories, materiality, recipes, poetry, science, and history of my current cross-disciplinary art project: The Urban Tree Oracle.  Every month I dive into a topic that I’ve been learning about and share with you my experiences, inspirations, and creative work.  If you are new here, welcome! 

Newsletter format update:
I thought it made sense to offer this newsletter every two weeks. That was the time, space, and focus of summer speaking. Now fall has begun with all the events, family, teaching, and life. It seems like once a month is really right after all.

This week:
Some information about upcoming events and images from recent work…

Gatherings this fall:

Lets gather with our sylvan friends this fall each month:

September 25 with Linden

for members of the Boston University Community, Boston, MA
Wednesday September 25, 2024, 4:30-6:00pm
In collaboration with The Department of Earth & Environment
Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences building is ringed by large, gracious Linden trees.  They can be easily recognized by their heart-shaped leaves, which on some Linden varieties have a silvery underside.  In mid summer they can also be sensed from far away by the powerful scent of their abundant creamy-white flower clusters that attract millions of bees and other pollinators.  Littleleaf Linden is one of the most common street trees in Boston, loved for its fast growth, dense canopy, and tolerance. For centuries Linden tea has been brewed for its calming effect.  Communities throughout their range assemble to celebrate and commune under Lindens.  For all of these qualities, Linden is an ally in the moments when one needs the support and nourishment of community.  They are gracious hosts, inviting us to gather and share.  When we seek connection, friendship, and allies, Linden will guide our way.
We will gather with Linden on the lawn directly behind Marsh Chapel and participate in a collective somatic exercise with Linden, exploring other ways of knowing and being with our more-than-human kin. Then we will process and reflect through drawing and writing with ink made from Linden’s leaves and bark. By the end of the  session, participants will generate their own oracle card (an image and text-based tool for  intuition and divination), guided by the ecology and life of Linden.  
Space is limited to 20
Email janemarsching@gmail.com to register

October 11 with Tree of Heaven

at The Cloth Collaborative in Hyde Park, MA
Friday October 11, 2024, 6:00-8:00PM
Tree of Heaven encircles the home of The Cloth Collaborative in Brick Island Studios in Hyde Park. They are growing along the edges, in yards, neglected corners, overlooked territory.
Emerging from a complex set of histories and interactions, Tree of Heaven can teach us so much about finding home in disturbed and novel ecosystems. We will gather by the emergent Tree of Heaven and participate in sensory movement prompts. Then, participants will process and reflect through drawing and writing with ink made from Tree of Heaven. By the end of the session, participants will generate their own oracle card (an image and text-based tool for intuition and divination), guided by the ecology and life of Tree of Heaven.
Space is limited to 10
Registration link

November 20 with Sycamore

for members of the MassArt Community, Boston, MA
Wednesday November 20, 2024, 1:15-2:45pm at MassArt
Sycamores and London Plane trees live throughout the Boston Fens area. They have been living on this planet for over a hundred million years and can live for 500-600 years, becoming ancient guardian trees in our ecologies. They have stood as witness on earth long before humans appeared, patiently bearing with all that happens during their lives. They are an ally to us in this time when we are called to the courageous act of witnessing: a revelatory staying with the trouble and speaking truth.
We will gather with Sycamore in Evans Way Park and participate in a collective somatic exercise with the sun, time, and Sycamore. Then we will process and reflect through drawing and writing with ink made from Sycamore. By the end of the session, participants will generate their own oracle card (an image and text-based tool for intuition and divination), guided by the ecology and life of Sycamore.
Space is limited to 20
email janemarsching@gmail.com to register

December 21 with Hemlock

at my studio, Hyde Park, MA
Saturday December 21, 2024, 7:00-9:00PM
More on this event in my next newsletter, but suffice it to say that I’m really excited to be gathering with Hemlock on the Winter Solstice. Hemlock is one of my dearest tree companions. I first made a piece with them in 2013 and have communed with their cool, soft, delicate and powerful presence ever since. They are a tree of transformation, of change. I have made ink from the tiny cones, from the tannin-rich bark, and by charcoalizing twigs and branches as they fall from the slowly dying Hemlock outside my studio window. We will make our own Hemlock charcoal together and participate in a meditative score around the solstice fire, in community on the darkest night of the year, dreaming of what is lost, what is behind us, what is to come, what is becoming.
Registration for this event will open up in November…

leaving you with some images of trees and inks and prints… hope to see some of you at gatherings this fall…

Keep your eyes out for my next newsletter the week of October 1. I’ll share about Linden, a score for a hum dance, and how connection, frienship and community are keys to climate resilience and justice.

This newsletter shares the images, stories, materiality, recipes, poetry, science, and history of my current cross-disciplinary art project: The Urban Tree Oracle.  Every two weeks I dive into a topic that I’ve been learning about and share with you my experiences, inspirations, and creative work.  If you are new here, welcome! 

Newsletter format update:
You may notice that this newsletter has shifted from a monthly to a bimonthly format.  Why?  As I have been planning out things I want to share about the project, and as my own relationships with urban trees deepens, I realized that I have such a backlog of writing and content, that touching down here every two weeks is a better container. 

This week:
I promised to share this week about making ink from trees, a practice that is at the material and practice center of the project.  Along with stories of how I got to this practice, how it roots me in my local ecology, and what it means to collaborate with trees.

My first ink archive, from Field Station, Lincoln, MA, 2013

I’ve been making ink from trees for over a decade now, focusing on the plants that live around me.  The process begins with noticing them, then observing their growth, relations, and habits, ideally through the seasons.  At various points I foraging for fallen elements, and processing them into ink to be shared, used in my projects, and saved in archives. Making these plant inks has given me a process that is rooted in place; each of the plants has their own story of how they got to their home and how they are connected, or not, to other beings here.  I spend time learning about the histories, cultures, economies, and politics that shape our experience of them.  I absorb the stories we tell about them in conversations with people, in art, poetry, fiction, music, and more—a hungry forager of rhizomatic impressions, arboreal feeling, sylvan symbols…

Foraging for Sumac as part of Utopia Press at Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, MA, in the Nashua River Valley, 2020

And making ink from plants has rooted me in ecological time in ways I had not been aware of.  I imagine them seven generations ago and seven generations from now.  It takes seasons, and years, to get to know them deeply.  Its slow.  The slowness creeps up on me and surprises me with its sensitivity, complexity, and depth.  This slowness allies me with deep time, with an expanded sense of how every action and expression affects every being around me, often in ways that are not apparent in the rushing track of capital and empire time. I fall into arboreal time, an ecological time, a wild time.

I have always loved making ink from (or more aptly with) trees.  I’ve never been sure why, and maybe The Urban Tree Oracle project exists to find an answer to that question for me, at least partially.  Tree inks are often more archival than the more fugitive inks of flowers and leaves.  Tree inks are not just the browns from tannins in the bark, but also yellows, pinks, reds, blacks, greens, and more.  The inks can be made from the bark, from seeds, from berries and fruits, from flowers, thorns, and roots.  Many trees can offer more than one ink: sumac, which I’ll share more about in the next newsletter, can offer a deep red from their drupes (also known as the fruits or berries) as well as a startling cool, even purplish, black from the intense tannins in their leaves.  There are likely other inks that Sumac holds: perhaps in their roots or their heartwood.  It’s a never ending process of discovery.

In practice I am more wild experimenter than orderly scientist when I make inks.  I have a sense of the basic processes for different tree organs (leaves, bark, fruits, etc.), and I proceed with intuition and a kind of call and response with the individual tree whose matter I have foraged (read these beautiful guidelines on reciprocal foraging as “an exchange of energy between forager and foraged” from pigment maker and artist Tilke Elkins, founder/director Wild Pigment Project. For example, I have foraged oak galls, acorn caps, oak leaves and bark from a variety of species.  I have about eight inks from these different oak organs ranging from warm brown to deep black to silvery gray.  Each time I try to make acorn cap ink, it looks different.  Not just darker or lighter, but warmer or cooler, more silvery or more brown.  Together they make a rich oak palette.

Oak ink bark, galls, and acorns from various varieties, 2020-present

Each ink process produces its own unique, unrepeatable results.  Why unrepeatable?  I’m never sure, and really love the mystery.  Perhaps it’s the composition of the rain, river, or reservoir water.  Perhaps it’s the experience of the tree in their life that creates the particular composition of molecules that release pigments.  Perhaps its other beings, like lichen, who often make their way into the ink (is it possible to make ink with crab apple and not invite lichen to the table?). 

Ink swatches from Common Buckthorn berries foraged on my morning Covid era walks along the Neponset River, Hyde Park and Milton, MA, 2020

Making these inks includes human made materials, deeply embroiled in the complexities of economies, politics, and cultures of the Anthropocene.  In fact, there is nothing in the project that is not implicated in this human and more-than-human entanglement.  Even the rain water might have emissions from energy plants.  The tree may have hyperaccumulated heavy metals from the soil.  My pots might have come from iron ore deep in the earth in Africa or manufactured into pots in China.  The soda ash that often helps to draw out the tannins may have come from Wyoming.  The cloves I sometimes use as a preservative originated in Indonesia but are grown around the world now.  The inks tell the story of colonization, of global markets, and more. 

Ink materials from the MassArt Resilient Pigment Library, a learning library I created in 2020 from pigments collected from all around the world

When I first started making ink from plants over a decade ago, I couldn’t readily connect with people around the world experimenting with pigment foraging and processing in their studios and homes. I spent a lot of time searching for medieval (often alchemical) recipes that used things like wine and urine, and trying to repeat and translate the ingredients and processes in this age. There was an incredible amount of information, experiments, recipes, and amazing colors from fibers folks making dye.  Ink is a bit different than dye.  They both are pigment-based, but dye has opportunities to bond, chemically and materially, with the fibers in which it is soaked, totally altering its makeup.  On the other hand, ink is its own body and sits on a surface, with less absorption and alteration of its makeup.   What it looks like in the bottle and on the brush is what it looks like on the paper.

Locally foraged handmade pigment swatches from Field Station, 2013-15, Lincoln, MA

For this first ink making experimentation, I was doing a project, Field Station Concordia, that involved a sort of re-enacting of the forms of attention, observation, recording, and connecting that Thoreau engaged in his entire life.  And so it felt natural that a part of that attention for me as an artist would become form through transforming plant bodies into inks for drawing and printmaking. I tried to make ink from every being in the ecosystem the project was sited in: the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts.  I made ink from smooshing wild raspberries growing along the parking lot edge.  I mixed Flint Pond water with stinging nettle growing in a naturalist’s yard in Concord, and copper pennies found on a path.  I foraged fallen hemlock bark from a Superfund site and steeped it in water from the nearby Sudbury River, making a deep radioactive brown.  I made a grainy dark cocoa color from the silty earth in the Mill Brook that runs through the town of Concord.  I was given unripe green berries from Oriental Bittersweet by a natural dye craftsperson living in Lincoln, which made a surprising orangey color.   

Field Station Concordia impressions with stinging nettle, sumac, and vetch among other beings whose name I do not know, 2013 monoprints 6x9”

Over time, I have slowed down more and more into this process.  I no longer look at plants as objects to provide me with color.  I try to get to know them through my senses, through sustained presence, through intuition and imagination, through sensory and somatic engagement.  I begin with respect and gratitude.  I work to keep open my body, mind, and spirit to all that I don’t know, to the mysteries no one knows about trees. 

I listen.  This listening is unknowing.  Its beginners mind.  Its often uncomfortable.  I am not always sure what I am hearing.  I sometimes hear nothing.  Often the processes involved in making the inks sensitizes me slowly, attentively, lovingly with this listening, so much so I don’t even have to try, it just happens.  When the surprising yellow of the inner bark of the Amur Cork tree came to light as I was stripping their bark, I heard and felt a sacredness.  The yellow of sunlight, of of buddhist sutras, of daffodils, corn, and goldfinches, of the color of my Sufi Path, of the yellow spots on the endangered Eastern Spotted Turtles I see on my morning walk along the river, all flashed before me.  The outer Amur Cork bark is spongy and, well, cork-like.  Its resilient.  What is sacred resilience?  I think Amur Cork posed that question to me.  And now as I make ink or draw with that ink, or just pass by, see, or touch Amur Cork, I let that question settle, find, and make sense in my life, in the world today. 

Image of the inner bark of Amur Cork from Yale students

Image from an article on “The effect of traditional amur cork tree bark extract dyes,” Yanbing Luo, Quan Wei 7 Yanfei Wek, Heritage Science 10: 82, 2022

Image of dyed Amur Cork bark yellow paper from a Japanese village (see article here)

Save the date: Upcoming gathering

I’m excited to share with you all that I’m guiding the second Urban Tree Oracle gathering with The Cloth Collaborative Studio and Workshop Friday, October 11, 2024 from 6:00-7:30pm.  The Cloth Collaborative is an amazing, homey, gorgeous space dreamed up by fibers artist Samantha Fields. Its located in Hyde Park, the southern tip of Boston. Sam describes it as “an art making space focused on textile practices as a means to explore ourselves in relationship to each other and the earth.”  I’ve been a fan for quite a while and am thrilled to offer a gathering with Ailanthus or Tree of Heaven under the auspices of the generous umbrella of the Cloth Collaborative.  We will gather and move with Tree of Heaven, explore their pigment in dye and ink, and draw our own oracle cards to take home.
This is a save the date announcement. In the next newsletter in 2 weeks, I’ll include a link to sign up (there are only 20 spots).

Next newsletter

In two weeks I’ll share images, stories, and recipes for making ink from trees.  I just foraged some bright red lemony sumac drupes from the edge of the supermarket parking lot and saw a dense colony of Sumacs on the roadside on the way home from which I can forage some leaves.  I’ll share recipes for making these two colors from one tree.

Also, I have so many pigment people to share with you.  The pigment world is vast, rich, and varied.  I’ve run across so many incredibly inspiring practices that have enriched my own work. 

Gratitudes

Thank you to the trees, particularly Amur Cork, who spoke up for this offering.  Thank you to artist, writer and curator Tilke Elkins (both her own practice and the Wild Pigment Project) whose work is so inspiring to me and so many.  Thank you to friends who listen and offer wisdom and feedback for this project (Deb, Patte, Sheila and Nikki this week).  Thank you to writer, poet and witch, Kate Belew, whose Numinous Newsletter course has helped shape this new venture.

Land Acknowledgement

I am writing this week’s newsletter from mid-Vermont from the unceded territories of the Western Abenaki, Wabanaki and Mohican peoples.  I had to research to find this out from the incredible map resource native-land.ca.  It feels totally out of alignment to only be able to offer this land acknowledgement through an internet search.  As I’ve walked in the afternoons among the hemlocks, crab apples, maples, and birches, I’ve offered silent thanks.  This land is unceded and scarred by the injustices of colonialism and the oppression faced by the Western Abenaki, Wabanaki, and Mohican people.  I offer my respect and gratitude to them and to this land

image by Deb Todd Wheeler

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Hi everyone,

How did it get to be 5 weeks since I first let everyone know I’m starting a newsletter?  Time in the summer is so elastic, so mysterious, so open-ended.  I’ve been working away like crazy on the project and making a lot of headway, or maybe heartway, and I’m excited to share some of the ideas, experiences, and aspirations here.  But for now, I thought I’d share how I got to this project, what its core is…
My elevator sentence for the project is: the Urban Tree Oracle is a collective tool for climate resilience through creating opportunities to deepen into relationship with our more-than-human kin, urban trees. [a little note—I’m using terminology like more-than-human and some of it may not be familiar to people; along the way I’ll try to flesh out what I mean by these words] I like the basic language of this description, but I’m not sure if everyone really knows what I mean, so here goes with a little more background, starting in this newsletter with: why trees?

The trees of the project live amongst us in our urban worlds on streets, in parks, backyards, urban wilds, corporate courtyards, and on the edges of parking lots, brownfields, train tracks, and other ruderal habitats. They are beings who have lived in this region for ages: black cherries, willows, elms, hemlocks, black walnuts… Some have found their way here through the legacy of colonialism: Ailanthus, Bee Bee, Ginko… They are integral to our ability to live just and healthy lives; not just because we literally could not breathe if they weren’t providing us oxygen (I’ve heard that one large tree can provide one day of oxygen for up to four people).  But also because they are a key element in maintain our complex urban ecologies: think of temperature, air quality, soil quality, carbon sequestration and so much more.  Perhaps most crucially, they are beings with agency, connected to the complex network of agents in our local ecologies, planted intentionally and volunteering themselves, beloved and hated, useful and beautiful, and so much more.

So trees are at the center of the project.  How did I get to this intentional relating with trees, to grappling with what tree consciousness means? I have long walked alongside the Neponset River, which weaves its way from its headwaters in Foxboro, 49 miles through the Boston neighborhoods of Milton, Hyde Park, Mattapan, and Dorchester, ending in the harbor.  I also walk through the forests of the Blue Hill Reservation, just south of what is now called Boston, unceded land of the Massachusett Tribe. The Massachusett took their name from the Algonquian term describing the area visible from the Great Hill, now referred to as the Blue Hills, which I am looking out at from my studio right now. Over time I was struck by how little I knew about these magnificent beings all around me. So, I started to use iNaturalist, a community app for identifying wild species around us, and I learned about the trees I was seeing every day. And as I did so, the world came more alive for me. I started with knowing names and things like “native” or “invasive.” But quickly I became more interested in getting to know what they were like in the cycle of a year, in community with the beings around them, in the habitats they preferred. And in how they help us to live and breathe, stay warm or cool, settle anxiety, lift spirits, offer food, aid in healing, and so much more.

The tree that began all of this is a dying hemlock living right outside my studio window, who I looked out on every day during Covid.  They are beset by the wooly adelgid, a sap sucking beetle from Japan, introduced in 1951.  The wooly adelgid has no predators and has been spreading north for decades, now found even up to Nova Scotia.  They do what their name suggests: get their nutrition from the sap of the tree, causing Hemlock to slowly lose needles, stop producing new growth, ultimately to die where they stand.  I think the Hemlock outside my window is maybe 75 years old.  I don’t know who planted them, or even if they were intentionally planted.  But if you’ve ever been in a Hemlock forest, you know how special they are.  A hemlock forest is like a place from fairy tales: the light is muted, the temperature is cooler, the air feels different, sounds are softer.  The Hemlock ecosystem is unique and totally created by the tree itself, host to unique and delicate plants, countless animal, microbial, and fungal beings.  When you are in one, you are transformed. 

At one point, there were hemlock forests all up and down the east coast, but colonization and industrialization destroyed most of these forests, leaving small stands vulnerable and isolated.  The wooly adelgid is just trying to survive and they has found an easy mark in Eastern Hemlock.  I want to tell this story as a collective of agents, all just living their lives, eating, breathing, propagating, with no one entity as bad or evil.  But the two beings: hemlock and the wool adelgid are not able to be in a balanced and harmonious relationship in their radically altered ecosystems.  So, now, Hemlocks is dying all throughout their range.  It’s a super sad, emblematic, and sobering story.  One that has long felt deeply personal to me.  I thank Hemlock for being open to being in relationship with me for all these years (the first project I did with them was in 2013 when I was grieving the end of my marriage and searching for a way to work through those feelings through my studio practice, I now see).

One of the things I learned about along the way of getting to know trees in our urban ecosystem is that they are a harbinger of injustice created by centuries of systemic racist policies.  One simple fact can capture the discrepancy: the tree canopy is vastly different across Boston neighborhoods (as with most cities in the US).  This correlates with income, race, and other factors.  So neighborhoods with the fewest trees are most affected by poor air quality, higher temperatures, and other climate factors.  Those are the neighborhoods with most vulnerable populations.  There are incredible organizations working to change this in Boston, including Speak for the Trees, and now Boston has an urban forester in city government and a new urban forest plan whose central mission is to address tree equity. 

            One goal of the project is to connect the deepening into relationship with trees as more-then-human kin with the real work to ameliorate this tree canopy inequity.  The project highlights one of the ways each tree creates, survives, adapts, maintains, supports, and heals its ecosystem.  So for box elder, a scrappy enthusiastically spreading often unwelcome ruderal being, the aspect I draw out is intimacy because box elders are a kind of maple, and like all maples, their sap is sweet and that sweetness is valued by so many beings in their ecosystems, including humans.  Or for oak, its endurance, for their long long lives and how slowly their leaves decompose. The Urban Tree Oracle asks: how can nourishing and encouraging aspects of being like intimacy or endurance help us to foster more just and healthy communities for every single being?

There are 26 trees in the Urban Tree Oracle.  Its taken a very long time to get to know them, and its still an ongoing process.  Well, a lot of time in high capitalism, but a blink of an eye in tree time.  I visit with white pine every day, listening to her susurrations as I walk in and out of my house.  I lie under a stand of oaks at the lake cabin we frequent every summer.  I crane my head while driving to admire the lush flowering of black locust along the highways.  I try not to be repulsed by the odor of ailanthus blooms while eating at an outdoor patio in Hyde Park.  All in all, getting to know these sylvan beings has made the world around me come alive even more, made my life less solitary, joined me to a great community of teeming febrile life.  Like any good friendship, knowing these trees supports me, helps me to expand and grow, and they stand with me when things are hard or wonderful.

If we all had an animistic awareness and deep relating with the other beings we are cohabitating with in our homes, neighborhoods, commutes, etc., then it would be impossible to put ourselves and our needs first.  We’d steward our ecosystems with care.  We’d work with our neighbors to create inclusive communities.  We’d be open to intuition, mystery, the unknown, and the otherwise.  I hope that participating in the project introduces you to this way of being with trees, with our ecosystem, with our neighbors, to create a just and healthy future for all.

For the next newsletter, I’ll share with you the inks I make from each tree.  Not just how I make the inks, but also what it means to work with trees as collaborators, to try to give voice to the tree.  Until then, I’d love to hear any thoughts that came up as you read this.  Or any stories of trees that you love.  We all have them!

If you know anyone who you think would be interested in these musings, please share this newsletter link. And I’ll be posting about a series of gatherings in person in the Boston area in the fall, so keep your eye out.

More about the project from my website.

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Hello to the first readers of this new monthly newsletter. Thanks for joining! I’ve never really written a public newsletter, though I have shared studio and writing news in a more promotional format, so bear with me while I try to find my voice and what feels useful and inspiring to share.

Mostly this newsletter is centering around a project I’ve been slowly working on for quite some time, The Urban Tree Oracle. Its a collective tool for climate resilience through creating opportunities to deepen into relationship with our more-than-human kin, urban trees. [a little note—I’m using terminology like more-than-human and some of it may not be familiar to people, along the way I’ll try to flesh out what I mean by these words] The trees are those that live amongst us in our urban worlds on streets, in parks, backyards, urban wilds, corporate courtyards, and on the edges of parking lots, brownfields, train tracks, and other ruderal habitats. They are beings who have lived in this region for ages: black cherries, willows, elms, hemlocks, black walnuts… Some have found their way here through the legacy of colonialism: Ailanthus, Bee Bee, Amur Cork, Empress… They are integral to our ability to live just and healthy lives. They are beings with agency, connected to the complex network of beings in our local ecologies, planted intentionally or volunteering themselves, beloved or hated, useful or beautiful, and so much more.

The Urban Tree Oracle invites us into a deeper knowing of our more-than-human kin, urban trees, through small gatherings that guide participants through a series of embodied exercises followed by a writing and drawing session with the tree ink, where we make our own individual oracle cards. We can take these cards home, perhaps put them up over our desk, and remember the experiences we had getting to know the tree and the wisdom the tree has to offer. There is no oracle deck consisting of one card per tree with a set of fixed meanings. Instead there are infinite oracle cards for each tree. Together we create the oracle, together we cohere the many “meanings” that can help guide us in our lives. Together we share our individual knowing with the aim of creating a multivalent oracle that is always in creation.

Thanks for reading all this background. Some things I want to write about (which are mostly things I am puzzling over and trying to absorb fully in my daily studio practice):

• making inks (including foraging tips, recipes, and other practical stuff) and how inks are both the body and voice of the tree, which touches on what it might mean to know a tree, to be in relation with a tree, to collaborate with a tree…

• embodiment as a pathway into our sensory, expanded, emergent states of being, which often we are not attuned to in this world that so privileges analytical thinking, hierarchies, and goal oriented work

• tree senses and how we might get to know how trees sense, know, communicate, and act. When and how are their senses similar to ours, or vastly different? Does tuning into sylvan awareness and agency expand our sense of our humanness?

• climate resilience, what this means, how we can create tools and communities and experiences that will help us to live healthy and just lives in the climate crisis?

• plant intelligence. Science is showing us so much right now about beings without brains who have think, plan for the future, communicate with other beings, make choices, care for progeny and more... Is plant conciousness knowable to us and how does our knowing change how we behave and feel?

• justice and trees. How tree canopy is an indicator of injustice in our communities. what is being done about it? Which organizations are doing this work and how we can support them?

• the future according to trees. Tree time is an amazing thing—twice daily cycles, pulses, centuries of life, and so much more. Can trees help us imagine the future, care about the future?

• tree stories. I’ll introduce you to some trees that are living in our urban worlds. Perhaps crab apple or black cherry or maybe black locust or ailanthus, sharing stories that bring their lives and agency to you.

• pronouns and plants. what does it mean to use the it pronoun for a living being? What other pronouns make sense and why? This is a window into how language can limit or expand our tree thinking.

• animism. what is it? who does it? why should we care? How can we live in this world with an exquisitely sensitive awareness, communication, and cohabitation with trees?

• divination. methods, practices, histories. other oracular forms that look to the natural world for clues. divination as peering into the future through an intuitive lens…

• etc., etc.

Maybe you’re here because you’re interested in trees, or have followed my work, or are exploring animism and the more-than-human, or want to develop tools for climate resilience, or want to work for tree canopy justice, or love working in community, or are fascinated by deep listening or are a divination practitioner… Whatever it is, I’d love to know, as there are a million things on my mind to share and I could easily pivot to any one thing if you call me there. In any case, I’d love to hear what you thought of this missive, and what landed with you.

Till soon,

Jane

janemarsching.com/urban-tree-oracle

just a note that the website is still under development… there is plenty there, but its not complete…

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