Memorial Trees and Treescape Memories

Abstract

The interconnections between trees and memorialisation are explored at three particular sites in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand. Memorial trees have been used as a seemingly blank canvas, to be coloured by the paintbox of memory. The ability of such trees to carry significant memories of past events into the present involves myriad slippages and all kinds of untidiness: the settings in which memorial trees are asked to perform are subject to significant and often transformative cultural change; the trees themselves are active organic components in the changing coconstitution of place and place meanings; and tree places can afford emotional responses and serve as spaces of much more immediate and prereflexive practice and performance. These dynamics suggest rather different connections between trees and memorialisation, which we term treescape memories.

Attending to grape vines: perceptual practices, planty agencies and multiple temporalities in Australian viticulture

“…Plants are often portrayed as subverting human designs in unexpected ways, particularly in accounts of indigenous and European plants' propensities to 'abscond' from their assigned roles and places within postcolonial Antipodean ecologies to produce unruly and sometimes hazardous landscapes (Barker 2008;Franklin 2006;Ginn 2008). Accounts of gardening, meanwhile, often emphasise plants' capacities to call forth unexpected activities and meanings from gardens (Cloke and Pawson 2008). Plants' activities can thus trigger subtle disturbances of gardens' spatial and affective characteristics, which their human occupants may experience as enjoyable spontaneity (Hitchings 2003) or find awkward and unsettling (Hitchings 2007;Hitchings and Jones 2004).…”

“…Relationships between plants and humans form a crucial dimension of issues including agricultural sustainability, food security (Head, Atchison and Gates 2012), biosecurity and biodiversity conservation (Barker 2008) and of questions about how human and nonhumans are to share urban green spaces (Cloke and Pawson 2008;Hitchings 2007;Whatmore and Hinchliffe 2010). As such, some of the most pressing social and ecological problems which confront contemporary social and cultural geographers concern questions about how humans and plants might and should live together (Head and Atchison 2009;Jones and Cloke 2002).…”

“…Expanding upon a wellestablished turn to studying more-than-human dimensions of social life (Clark 2011;Hustak and Myers 2012;Whatmore 2002;Whatmore and Hinchliffe 2010), geographers are enthusiastically exploring human-plant relationships within gardening practices (Cloke and Pawson 2008;Ginn 2008;Hitchings 2007;Hitchings and Jones 2004) and human engagements with wild or feral vegetation (Barker 2008;Franklin 2006). Yet interventions investigating human-plant interactions in agricultural settings remain comparatively rare (although see Head, Atchison and Gates 2012;Inhetveen 1994;Jones and Cloke 2002;Richardson-Ngwenya 2012).…”

Antiquity at the National Memorial Arboretum

“…Through the selected species, numbers and location, a complete arboreal iconography is employed following traditions well established in twentieth-century war commemoration (including the Commonwealth War Graves Commission). A key component of this tree symbolism is the evocation of distant times and distant places by the choices made over which species were selected for particular plantings and the names afforded to them (see Gough 1996, Cloke and Pawson 2008. Indeed, trees are not only aimed as a metaphor of living remembrance, they also encapsulate a hope for real restoration of the living in a spiritual and a physical sense.…”

“…Individually and collectively, trees are mnemonic agents with the NMA linking past and present (see also Cloke and Pawson 2008). The complex and pervasive arboreal commemorative symbolism is explained principally through the visitor guidebook.…”