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by Valentina Lagomarsino
figures by Hannah Zucker

When scientists first studied the structure of nerve cells that comprise the human brain, they noted their strong resemblance to trees. In fact, dendrites, the term to describe projections from a nerve cell, comes from the Greek word Dendron, for "tree." While the connection in the appearance of nerve cells was made to trees, the comparison may have been more apt than originally realized: scientists are starting to uncover that trees have their own sort of nervous system that is capable of facilitating tree communication, memory and learning.

Forests are complex systems

Forests cover 30% of Earth's land surface and hold over a billion trees. Forests are known as "carbon sinks" because trees absorb carbon dioxide from the air, store the carbon in their trunks, and exhale oxygen. Scientist have leveraged this property to measure the ratio between two naturally occurring forms of carbon ( ¹²carbon and ¹⁴carbon) to assign an age to trees, a technique termed carbon dating. Using this technique, scientists found that trees living in forests, like the tree colony called Pando, tend to live longer than trees living in urban environments, often in isolation. Dendrologists, scientists who study wooded plants, thought that perhaps trees that lived together were helping each other by sending resources through their roots. To test this out in North American forests, dendrologists utilized a technique called isotope tracing. In this experiment, scientists injected carbon dioxide gas replaced with radiolabeled ¹⁴carbon into the trunk of Birch trees (Figure 1). When nearby Fir trees were covered by shaded cloth, to block their ability to acquire nutrients through photosynthesis, scientists found a higher level of radiolabeled ¹⁴carbon in their trunk, meaning they must have received sugars from the Birch. These experiments confirmed that trees are indeed communicating with each other and sharing nutrients through their roots, forming a complex system sometimes referred to as the "wood wide web."

With a little help from my friends

This complex network connecting trees is dependent on a symbiotic relationship with microbes in the soil like fungi and bacteria. Symbiosis is when two separate organisms form a mutually advantageous relationship with each other. Fungi can cover a large surface area by developing white fungal threads known as mycelium. Mycelium spreads out on top of tree roots by up-taking sugars from the tree and by providing vital minerals back to the tree, such as nitrogen and phosphorus (Figure 2). This symbiotic relationship between tree roots and fungi is known as the mycorrhizal network (from Greek, Myco, "fungi" and Rhiza, "root").

To identify the species that constitute the mycorrhizal network, scientists have utilized recent technological advances in DNA sequencing and big-data analysis. Microbiologists have identified different species of fungi and bacteria that form symbiotic relationships with different species of trees. Scientists believe all trees have a mycorrhizal network, but trees only communicate with each other if the fungal and bacterial species that constitute their mycorrhizal networks are the same. The most common combination of fungi constitute the arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) network, which has been found to be important for nutrient uptake in 65% of all trees and plant species. The remaining 35% of tree and plant species may have combinations of other fungi varieties that comprise their networks.

By investigating the different interactions between species of trees, scientists found that trees leverage similarities and differences in their microbial "makeup" to recognize other trees of their own species, and they preferentially share nutrients with them through their mycorrhizal network. This behavior, known as "kin recognition," was recently explored when multiple families of Douglas Fir trees were planted in a plot and carbon tracing experiments indicated that trees of the same family shared more carbon than between trees of different families. Scientists are still investigating why this is happening, but it is hypothesized that all plants evolved to have kin recognition for reproductive purposes. Similarly, there is cross-talk between different species of trees that share the same mycorrhizal network, such as between Birch and Fir trees (Figure 3). Interspecies tree communication has been shown to increase the fitness and resiliency of trees.

Mycorrhizal networks are extremely important for tree health during times of danger. Certain species of fungi can facilitate tree resilience to certain environmental stressors such as predators, toxins, and pathogenic microbes that invade an ecosystem. By using a technique called allelopathy, in which a chemical signal is sent through the mycorrhizal network, trees can warn their neighbors about an invasive predator or to inhibit growth of invasive plant species. Surrounding trees can then defend themselves by releasing volatile hormones or chemicals to deter predators or pathogenic bugs. It was even found that trees can send a stress signal to nearby trees after a major forest disturbance, such as deforestation.

Climate change affects the microbiome of the forest

Trees rely on a healthy forest ecosystem to thrive and protect themselves from danger. Humans rely on a healthy forest ecosystem to be able to inhale clean oxygen. Last year, millions of people around the world experienced the devastating effects of climate change. Not only is climate change impacting human health and wellbeing, but it is also affecting the ecosystem of our oceans and forests. Human-initiated deforestation contributes to climate change by reducing the number of trees that are available to soak up carbon dioxide. Deforestation not only removes the trees that are being cut down, but also impacts trees that are still alive by disrupting the mycorrhizal network that is important for intra-tree communication.

Changes in climate, as seen through increased droughts and extreme temperatures, may further disrupt the biodiversity of the microbes in the forest. This decline in biodiversity is known as human assisted evolution, or " unnatural selection". The altered microbiota of the forest may then change the nutrients that trees are able to receive and we may start seeing changes in tree morphology, particularly in the shape of leaves. This would change the photosynthetic capacity of the tree; for example, smaller leaves have less surface area for light absorption, which will negatively impact their ability to absorb the sun's rays and produce sugars through photosynthesis. This could potentially inhibit tree growth and the amount of carbon that trees can share with fungi. Furthermore, without a biodiverse mycorrhizal network, trees are becoming more susceptible to destruction from invasive, harmful insect species. It is clear that the impact we are making on the environment is self-perpetuating and heading in a dire direction for the health of our forests, but there is still hope. Some scientists are trying to combat climate change by using gene-editing techniques to restore ecosystems that have become extinct and by engineering synthetic microbes that are important for a thriving ecosystem.

Trees are considered to be the oldest living organisms on the planet. Over centuries, they have been resilient to changes in their environment due to their symbiotic relationship to fungi and other microbes. There are so many more discoveries to be made to understand the ancient wisdom of our forests and the invisible microbes that keep our ecosystems in harmony.
Valentina Lagomarsino is a first-year PhD student in the Biological Biomedical Sciences program at Harvard University. Hannah Zucker is a second-year PhD candidate in the Program in Neuroscience at Harvard University.
For more information:

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Exploring The Underground Network of Trees - The Nervous System of the Forest - Science in the News

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by Valentina Lagomarsino figures by Hannah Zucker When scientists first studied the structure of nerve cells that comprise the human brain, they noted their strong resemblance to trees. In fact, dendrites, the term to describe projections from a nerve cell, comes from the Greek word Dendron, for "tree."

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A controversial German forester says yes, and his ideas are shaking up the scientific world

By Richard Grant, photographs by Diàna Markosian

I'm walking in the Eifel Mountains in western Germany, through cathedral-like groves of oak and beech, and there's a strange unmoored feeling of entering a fairy tale. The trees have become vibrantly alive and charged with wonder. They're communicating with one another, for starters. They're involved in tremendous struggles and death-defying dramas. To reach enormousness, they depend on a complicated web of relationships, alliances and kinship networks.

Wise old mother trees feed their saplings with liquid sugar and warn the neighbors when danger approaches. Reckless youngsters take foolhardy risks with leaf-shedding, light-chasing and excessive drinking, and usually pay with their lives. Crown princes wait for the old monarchs to fall, so they can take their place in the full glory of sunlight. It's all happening in the ultra-slow motion that is tree time, so that what we see is a freeze-frame of the action.

My guide here is a kind of tree whisperer. Peter Wohlleben, a German forester and author, has a rare understanding of the inner life of trees, and is able to describe it in accessible, evocative language. He stands very tall and straight, like the trees he most admires, and on this cold, clear morning, the blue of his eyes precisely matches the blue of the sky. Wohlleben has devoted his life to the study and care of trees. He manages this forest as a nature reserve, and lives with his wife, Miriam, in a rustic cabin near the remote village of Hümmel.

Now, at the age of 53, he has become an unlikely publishing sensation. His book The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, written at his wife's insistence, sold more than 800,000 copies in Germany, and has now hit the best-seller lists in 11 other countries, including the United States and Canada. (Wohlleben has turned his attention to other living things as well, in his Inner Life of Animals, newly issued in translation.)

A revolution has been taking place in the scientific understanding of trees, and Wohlleben is the first writer to convey its amazements to a general audience. The latest scientific studies, conducted at well-respected universities in Germany and around the world, confirm what he has long suspected from close observation in this forest: Trees are far more alert, social, sophisticated-and even intelligent-than we thought.

With his big green boots crunching through fresh snow, and a dewdrop catching sunlight on the tip of his long nose, Wohlleben takes me to two massive beech trees growing next to each other. He points up at their skeletal winter crowns, which appear careful not to encroach into each other's space. "These two are old friends," he says. "They are very considerate in sharing the sunlight, and their root systems are closely connected. In cases like this, when one dies, the other usually dies soon afterward, because they are dependent on each other."

Since Darwin, we have generally thought of trees as striving, disconnected loners, competing for water, nutrients and sunlight, with the winners shading out the losers and sucking them dry. The timber industry in particular sees forests as wood-producing systems and battlegrounds for survival of the fittest.

There is now a substantial body of scientific evidence that refutes that idea. It shows instead that trees of the same species are communal, and will often form alliances with trees of other species. Forest trees have evolved to live in cooperative, interdependent relationships, maintained by communication and a collective intelligence similar to an insect colony. These soaring columns of living wood draw the eye upward to their outspreading crowns, but the real action is taking place underground, just a few inches below our feet.

"Some are calling it the 'wood-wide web,'" says Wohlleben in German-accented English. "All the trees here, and in every forest that is not too damaged, are connected to each other through underground fungal networks. Trees share water and nutrients through the networks, and also use them to communicate. They send distress signals about drought and disease, for example, or insect attacks, and other trees alter their behavior when they receive these messages."

Scientists call these mycorrhizal networks. The fine, hairlike root tips of trees join together with microscopic fungal filaments to form the basic links of the network, which appears to operate as a symbiotic relationship between trees and fungi, or perhaps an economic exchange. As a kind of fee for services, the fungi consume about 30 percent of the sugar that trees photosynthesize from sunlight. The sugar is what fuels the fungi, as they scavenge the soil for nitrogen, phosphorus and other mineral nutrients, which are then absorbed and consumed by the trees.

For young saplings in a deeply shaded part of the forest, the network is literally a lifeline. Lacking the sunlight to photosynthesize, they survive because big trees, including their parents, pump sugar into their roots through the network. Wohlleben likes to say that mother trees "suckle their young,'' which both stretches a metaphor and gets the point across vividly.

Once, he came across a gigantic beech stump in this forest, four or five feet across. The tree was felled 400 or 500 years ago, but scraping away the surface with his penknife, Wohlleben found something astonishing: the stump was still green with chlorophyll. There was only one explanation. The surrounding beeches were keeping it alive, by pumping sugar to it through the network. "When beeches do this, they remind me of elephants," he says. "They are reluctant to abandon their dead, especially when it's a big, old, revered matriarch."

To communicate through the network, trees send chemical, hormonal and slow-pulsing electrical signals, which scientists are just beginning to decipher. Edward Farmer at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland has been studying the electrical pulses, and he has identified a voltage-based signaling system that appears strikingly similar to animal nervous systems (although he does not suggest that plants have neurons or brains). Alarm and distress appear to be the main topics of tree conversation, although Wohlleben wonders if that's all they talk about. "What do trees say when there is no danger and they feel content? This I would love to know." Monica Gagliano at the University of Western Australia has gathered evidence that some plants may also emit and detect sounds, and in particular, a crackling noise in the roots at a frequency of 220 hertz, inaudible to humans.

Trees also communicate through the air, using pheromones and other scent signals. Wohlleben's favorite example occurs on the hot, dusty savannas of sub-Saharan Africa, where the wide-crowned umbrella thorn acacia is the emblematic tree. When a giraffe starts chewing acacia leaves, the tree notices the injury and emits a distress signal in the form of ethylene gas. Upon detecting this gas, neighboring acacias start pumping tannins into their leaves. In large enough quantities these compounds can sicken or even kill large herbivores.

Giraffes are aware of this, however, having evolved with acacias, and this is why they browse into the wind, so the warning gas doesn't reach the trees ahead of them. If there's no wind, a giraffe will typically walk 100 yards- farther than ethylene gas can travel in still air-before feeding on the next acacia. Giraffes, you might say, know that the trees are talking to one another.

Trees can detect scents through their leaves, which, for Wohlleben, qualifies as a sense of smell. They also have a sense of taste. When elms and pines come under attack by leaf-eating caterpillars, for example, they detect the caterpillar saliva, and release pheromones that attract parasitic wasps. The wasps lay their eggs inside the caterpillars, and the wasp larvae eat the caterpillars from the inside out. "Very unpleasant for the caterpillars," says Wohlleben. "Very clever of the trees."

A recent study from Leipzig University and the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research shows that trees know the taste of deer saliva. "When a deer is biting a branch, the tree brings defending chemicals to make the leaves taste bad," he says. "When a human breaks the branch with his hands, the tree knows the difference, and brings in substances to heal the wound."

Our boots crunch on through the glittering snow. From time to time, I think of objections to Wohlleben's anthropomorphic metaphors, but more often I sense my ignorance and blindness falling away. I had never really looked at trees before, or thought about life from their perspective. I had taken trees for granted, in a way that would never be possible again.

We reach an area that he calls "the classroom." Young beech trees, in their own individual ways, are tackling the fundamental challenge of their existence. Like any tree, they crave sunlight, but down here below the canopy, only 3 percent of the light in the forest is available. One tree is the "class clown." Its trunk contorts itself into bends and curves, "making nonsense" to try to reach more light, instead of growing straight and true and patient like its more sensible classmates. "It doesn't matter that his mother is feeding him, this clown will die," says Wohlleben.

Another tree is growing two absurdly long lateral branches to reach some light coming through a small gap in the canopy. Wohlleben dismisses this as "foolish and desperate," certain to lead to future imbalance and fatal collapse. He makes these blunders sound like conscious, sentient decisions, when they're really variations in the way that natural selection has arranged the tree's unthinking hormonal command system. Wohlleben knows this, of course, but his main purpose is to get people interested in the lives of trees, in the hope that they will defend forests from destructive logging and other threats.

Wohlleben used to be a coldhearted butcher of trees and forests. His training dictated it. In forestry school, he was taught that trees needed to be thinned, that helicopter-spraying of pesticides and herbicides was essential, and that heavy machinery was the best logging equipment, even though it tears up soil and rips apart the mycorrhizae. For more than 20 years, he worked like this, in the belief that it was best for the forests he had loved since childhood.

He began to question the orthodoxies of his profession after visiting a few privately managed forests in Germany, which were not thinned, sprayed or logged by machine. "The trees were so much bigger and more plentiful," he says. "Very few trees needed to be felled to make a handsome profit and it was done using horses to minimize the impact."

At the same time, he was reading early research about mycorrhizae and mother trees, and studies about tree communication coming out of China, Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and South Africa. When he was ordered to clear-cut the forest near his home village of Hümmel-the fairy tale forest we've been walking through all morning-he invented excuses and prevaricated for several years. Then, in 2002, he went to the villagers and performed a mighty feat of persuasion.

After hearing his arguments, they agreed to give up their income from timber sales, turn the forest into a nature reserve, and allow it to slowly return to its primeval splendor. In 2006, Wohlleben resigned his state forestry job to become manager of the old beech forest for the town. Both Wohlleben and the villagers, perhaps, were tapping into the old German romanticism about the purity of forests.

To generate income, he created a wildwood cemetery, where nature lovers pay for their cremated remains to be buried in simple urns. "The trees are sold as living headstones," he says. There is some light horse-logging, and visitors also pay to take tours of the forest. For many years, Wohlleben led these tours himself, using lively, vivid, emotional phrasing to dramatize the largely inscrutable, ultra-slow-motion life of trees. People enjoyed it so much that Wohlleben's wife urged him to write a book along the same lines.

He has been taken to task by some scientists, but his strongest denouncers are German commercial foresters, whose methods he calls into question. "They don't challenge my facts because I cite all my scientific sources," he says. "Instead, they say I'm 'esoteric,' which is a very bad word in their culture. And they call me a 'tree-hugger,' which is not true. I don't believe that trees respond to hugs."

**********

Five-thousand miles away,at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Suzanne Simard and her grad students are making astonishing new discoveries about the sensitivity and interconnectedness of trees in the Pacific temperate rainforests of western North America. In the view of Simard, a professor of forest ecology, their research is exposing the limitations of the Western scientific method itself.

Simard is a warm, friendly, outdoorsy type with straight blond hair and a Canadian accent. In the scientific community, she's best known for her extensive research into mycorrhizal networks, and her identification of hyperlinked "hub trees," as she calls them in scientific papers, or "mother trees," as she prefers in conversation. Peter Wohlleben has referred extensively to her research in his book.

Mother trees are the biggest, oldest trees in the forest with the most fungal connections. They're not necessarily female, but Simard sees them in a nurturing, supportive, maternal role. With their deep roots, they draw up water and make it available to shallow-rooted seedlings. They help neighboring trees by sending them nutrients, and when the neighbors are struggling, mother trees detect their distress signals and increase the flow of nutrients accordingly.

In the forest ecology laboratory on campus, graduate student Amanda Asay is studying kin recognition in Douglas firs. (Ecologist Brian Pickles at England's University of Reading was the lead author and collaborator with Asay and others on the project.) Using seedlings, Asay and fellow researchers have shown that related pairs of trees recognize the root tips of their kin, among the root tips of unrelated seedlings, and seem to favor them with carbon sent through the mycorrhizal networks. "We don't know how they do it," says Simard. "Maybe by scent, but where are the scent receptors in tree roots? We have no idea."

Another grad student, Allen Larocque, is isolating salmon nitrogen isotopes in fungal samples taken near Bella Bella, a remote island village off the central coast of British Columbia. His team is studying trees that grow near salmon streams. "Fortunately for us, salmon nitrogen has a very distinctive chemical signature and is easy to track," he says. "We know that bears sit under trees and eat salmon, and leave the carcasses there. What we're finding is that trees are absorbing salmon nitrogen, and then sharing it with each other through the network. It's an interlinked system: fish-forest-fungi."

Larocque wonders what the best metaphor is for these exchanges, and for the flow of nutrients from mother trees to their neighbors and offspring. "Is it a sharing hippie lovefest? Is it an economic relationship? Or do mother trees just get leaky when they're old? I think all these things are happening, but we don't know."

Scientists are only just beginning to learn the language of trees, in Larocque's view. "We don't know what they're saying with pheromones most of the time. We don't know how they communicate within their own bodies. They don't have nervous systems, but they can still feel what's going on, and experience something analogous to pain. When a tree is cut, it sends electrical signals like wounded human tissue."

Over a sandwich lunch on campus, with Larocque listening carefully, Simard explains her frustrations with Western science. "We don't ask good questions about the interconnectedness of the forest, because we're all trained as reductionists. We pick it apart and study one process at a time, even though we know these processes don't happen in isolation. When I walk into a forest, I feel the spirit of the whole thing, everything working together in harmony, but we don't have a way to map or measure that. We can't even map the mycorrhizal networks. One teaspoon of forest soil contains several miles of fungal filaments."

After lunch, she takes me to a magnificent old grove of Western red cedars, bigleaf maples, hemlocks and Douglas firs. Walking into the forest, her face brightens, her nostrils flare as she breathes in the cool, damp, fragrant air.

She points to a massive, cloud-piercing giant with long, loose strips of grayish bark. "That red cedar is probably 1,000 years old," she says. "It's mother tree to the other cedars here, and it's linked to the maples too. Cedar and maple are on one network, hemlock and Douglas fir on another."

Why do trees share resources and form alliances with trees of other species? Doesn't the law of natural selection suggest they should be competing? "Actually, it doesn't make evolutionary sense for trees to behave like resource-grabbing individualists," she says. "They live longest and reproduce most often in a healthy stable forest. That's why they've evolved to help their neighbors."

If neighboring trees keep dying, gaps open up in the protective forest canopy. With increased sunlight, the trees left standing can photosynthesize more sugar, and grow faster, but, Simard says, they're also more vulnerable and short-lived. The mycorrhizal support system weakens. In summer, more hot sunshine reaches the delicate forest floor, heating up and drying out the cool, damp, evenly regulated microclimate that such forest trees prefer. Damaging winds can penetrate the forest more easily, and without neighboring tree crowns to stabilize against, the chance of being uprooted increases.

Looking up at these ancient giants with their joined-together crowns, it's extraordinary to contemplate everything they must have endured and survived together over the centuries. Lethal threats arrive in many forms: windstorms, ice storms, lightning strikes, wildfires, droughts, floods, a host of constantly evolving diseases, swarms of voracious insects.

Tender young seedlings are easily consumed by browsing mammals. Hostile fungi are a constant menace, waiting to exploit a wound, or a weakness, and begin devouring a tree's flesh. Simard's research indicates that mother trees are a vital defense against many of these threats; when the biggest, oldest trees are cut down in a forest, the survival rate of younger trees is substantially diminished.

Unable to move away from danger, falling in catastrophic numbers to the human demand for land and lumber, forest trees also face the threat of accelerating climate change, and this is a major new focus of Simard's work. She recently launched a 100-year experiment on Douglas firs, Ponderosa pines, lodgepole pines and western larch in 24 different locations in Canada. She calls it the Mother Tree Project.

Asked to sum up its goals, she says, "How do you conserve mother trees in logging, and use them to create resilient forests in an era of rapid climate change? Should we assist the migration of the forest by spreading seeds? Should we combine genotypes to make the seedlings less vulnerable to frost and predation in new regions? I've crossed a line, I suppose. This is a way of giving back what forests have given to me, which is a spirit, a wholeness, a reason to be."

**********

Not all scientists are on board with the new claims being made about trees. Where Simard sees collaboration and sharing, her critics see selfish, random and opportunistic exchanges. Stephen Woodward, a botanist from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, warns against the idea that trees under insect attack are communicating with one another, at least as we understand it in human terms. "They're not firing those signals to anything," Woodward says. "They're emitting distress chemicals. Other trees are picking it up. There's no intention to warn."

Lincoln Taiz, a retired professor of plant biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the co-editor of the textbook Plant Physiology and Development, finds Simard's research "fascinating," and "outstanding," but sees no evidence that the interactions between trees are "intentionally or purposefully carried out." Nor would that be necessary. "Each individual root and each fungal filament is genetically programmed by natural selection to do its job automatically," he writes by email, "so no overall consciousness or purposefulness is required." Simard, it should be noted, has never claimed that trees possess consciousness or intention, although the way she writes and talks about them makes it sound that way.

Taiz thinks that human beings are fatally susceptible to the mythology of thinking, feeling, speaking trees. In ancient Greece, trees delivered prophesies. In medieval Ireland, they whispered unreliable clues to leprechaun gold. Talking trees have starred in any number of Hollywood movies, from The Wizard of Oz to The Lord of the Rings to Avatar. Taiz sees the same old mythological impulse underlying some of the new claims about tree communication and intelligence, and the success of Wohlleben's book and Simard's TED talk "How Trees Talk to Each Other," which garnered well over two million views online.

In 2007, Taiz and 32 other plant scientists published an attack on the emerging idea that plants and trees possess intelligence. He is willing to "be liberal and go along with the idea" that trees exhibit a "swarm intelligence," but thinks it contributes nothing to our understanding, and leads us down an erroneous path toward tree consciousness and intentionality. "The appearance of purposefulness is an illusion, like the belief in 'intelligent design.' Natural selection can explain everything we know about plant behavior."

From his house in Henley-on-Thames in England, the eminent British scientist Richard Fortey expresses similar criticisms. Now semi-retired, he was a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, and visiting professor of paleobiology at Oxford. He has recently published The Wood for the Trees, about four acres of woodland that he owns in the Chiltern Hills. It is a magisterial work, and rigorously pruned of all sentiment and emotion.

"The mother tree protecting its little ones?" he says with gentle scorn. "It's so anthropomorphized that it's really not helpful. The case is overstated and suffused with vitalism. Trees do not have will or intention. They solve problems, but it's all under hormonal control, and it all evolved through natural selection."

When informed that Simard also detects a spiritual aspect in forests, Fortey sounds appalled. "Spiritual?" he says, as if the word were a cockroach on his tongue. "Oh dear, oh dear, well there's nothing to be said about that. Look, trees are networkers. They do communicate in their own way. What worries me is that people find this so appealing that they immediately leap to faulty conclusions. Namely that trees are sentient beings like us."

A notable offender in this regard, says Fortey, is Peter Wohlleben. "There's a lot of good new science in his book, and I sympathize with his concerns, but he describes trees as if they possess consciousness and emotions. His trees are like the Ents in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. "

When told about Fortey's criticism, that he describes trees as if they possess consciousness and emotions, Wohlleben smiles. "Scientists insist on language that is purged of all emotion," he says. "To me, this is inhuman, because we are emotional beings, and for most people, scientific language is extremely boring to read. The wonderful research about giraffes and acacia trees, for example, was done many years ago, but it was written in such dry, technical language that most people never heard about it."

Wohlleben's first priority is to not be boring, so he uses emotional storytelling techniques. His trees cry out with thirst, they panic and gamble and mourn. They talk, suckle and make mischief. If these words were framed in quotation marks, to indicate a stretchy metaphorical meaning, he would probably escape most of the criticism. But Wohlleben doesn't bother with quotation marks, because that would break the spell of his prose. "Then one day, it's all over," he writes of a tree meeting its demise in the forest. "The trunk snaps and the tree's life is at an end. 'Finally,' you can almost hear the young trees-in-waiting sigh."

Does he think trees possess a form of consciousness? "I don't think trees have a conscious life, but we don't know," he says. "We must at least talk about the rights of trees. We must manage our forests sustainably and respectfully, and allow some trees to grow old with dignity, and to die a natural death." In rejecting the confines of the careful, technical language of science, he has succeeded more than anyone in conveying the lives of these mysterious gigantic beings, and in becoming their spokesman.

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By Richard Grant, photographs by Diàna Markosian I'm walking in the Eifel Mountains in western Germany, through cathedral-like groves of oak and beech, and there's a strange unmoored feeling of entering a fairy tale. The trees have become vibrantly alive and charged with wonder. They're communicating with one another, for starters.

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Podcast on Dendrology by Alie Ward ft. Casey Clapp -a tree inspector and denrologist in Portland, Oregon. 

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Podcast on Dendrology by Alie Ward ft. Casey Clapp -a tree inspector and denrologist in Portland, Oregon. 

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Do trees have feelings? How do they talk? How old can they get? Are there any tree stories that will make me cry? Spoiler: YES. Possibly the world's most enthusiastic tree expert, J. Casey Clapp, shows Alie his many tree tattoos, explains how roots communicate to each other, addresses "crown shyness" and schools Alie on the mental health benefits of tree proximity. Also: banana facts and Casey f*cking hates apples.

Listen on Stitcher, iTunes, Omny, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

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Dendrology (TREES) with J. Casey Clapp - alie ward

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Do trees have feelings? How do they talk? How old can they get? Are there any tree stories that will make me cry? Spoiler: YES. Possibly the world's most enthusiastic tree expert, J.

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Transcript for Alie Ward’s podcast on Dendrology

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Structure of the tree

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Fallen tree in Phoenix park. How the roots go deep down and spread underground. Trees roots only go 3-4ft down, and can support the tree no matter how tall.

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Introduction to Tacita Dead as her website was currently inaccessible

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Tacita Charlotte Dean CBE, RA (born 1965) is a British visual artist who works primarily in film. She was a nominee for the Turner Prize in 1998, won the Hugo Boss Prize in 2006, and was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2008. She lives and works in Berlin, Germany, and Los Angeles, California.

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Tacita Charlotte Dean CBE, RA (born 1965) is a British visual artist who works primarily in film. She was a nominee for the Turner Prize in 1998, won the Hugo Boss Prize in 2006, and was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2008.

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The Botanical Mind Online - Camden Art Centre

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The Botanical Mind Online Humanity's place in the natural order is under scrutiny as never before, held in a precarious balance between visible and invisible forces: from the microscopic threat of a virus to the monumental power of climate change.

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A family of Pines, network of same family trees. Trees of the same family network share networks of roots and fungi underground connecting them and allowing them to share nutrients over vast spaces.

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Tester - animation slides
Testing out a animation app I found, but it ended up very fidgety with importing images and not ideal to draw directly on

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Katie Holten is an Irish artist and resistance fighter based in New York. She is best known for her iterative drawings and public artworks that investigate the disconnect between humans and nature. She created a Tree Alphabet and is the author of the book About Trees.

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Eamon O’Kane, in all things exhibition

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THE WORD IS FOR WORLD FOREST

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Paints trees and woodland spaces, but I love her use of colour to mystify they atmosphere and characteristics of the space. I want to bring colour into my work in a similar way.

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Condensed features from Balrath into a sketch of two parts of the walk. The bridge and thing trees and the dense ferns. A sketch that was to be painted.

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Merge of trees from Balrath Meath, Phoenix Park Dublin, and Salem Massachusetts... notion of trees connected by broader networks. Yet to find a way to connect them...

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Procreate sketch, a tree in the Phoenix Park with a combination of scars from broken and naturally shedded branches..

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The WordPress blog where I learn the history of the lightning tree which stands in the Old Burying Point in Salem. The tree is believed to have been struck by lightning 6-7 times, and at the foot of the tree lies the grave of Caleb Pickman who was struck by the tree and laid to rest there in 1737

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Jillian here. As you know, I recently went to visit my son in Rhode Island and while I was there, we spent a day in Salem, Mass. It was a lovely city and there's an awesome memorial to the witches there in an old cemetery. The accused witches each have a bench with their name caved on it and some people leave tokens and gifts on the benches. One bench had a sweet note from a nine-time great-grandson who left some flowers and a card that said they were all fine and doing well. So neat.

As my son, daughter-in-law and I walked around, I spotted a tree that had been struck by lightning. I knew that was what happened as I have a tree in my yard that was struck during Hurricane Ivan in 2004 that has similar scarring. I took pictures of the tree and then walked to the other side and noticed a gravestone that seemed too close to the tree. Way too close.

As I was looking at it, a docent came over and told us the story about the young man, Caleb Pickman, (22 yrs old) buried there. He was killed by a lightning strike on July 4, 1737. The tree was small and intact when he was buried there. Over the years since then, it has been struck five times.

The third picture down shows the back of the grave and just how close the tree was to his resting spot. Poor guy couldn't even get away from danger in death, could he?

I've got a lot of cool ideas on how to use this tree in stories. Does the tale or the setting inspire the writer in you?

So, anyone who tells you lightning never strikes twice in the same place is fibbing. 🙂

This entry was posted in Fall, Family, Jillian Chantal and tagged fall, Family, Jillian Chantal. Bookmark the permalink.

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Jillian here. As you know, I recently went to visit my son in Rhode Island and while I was there, we spent a day in Salem, Mass. It was a lovely city and there's an awesome memorial to the wi...

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interesting review of Wollheben’s book

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ISBN-13:
978-1771642484

Author:
Peter Wohlleben

Publisher:
Greystone Books

Guideline Price:
£16.99

Is there a distinction to be made between living and being alive? Certainly the language suggests there is. To be "merely" living is to be passive, and gradual to the point of inanition - as TS Eliot has it in The Four Quartets, "that which is only living / Can only die" - whereas to be alive is to be swiftly kinetic, primed with awareness, as when we say we "are alive to" this or that situation or phenomenon. Human beings are alive, so are animals, and so even, at one time, were the gods. We believe that our state, our "being alive", is in contradistinction to that of so-called inanimate objects, such as rocks, rivers - and trees.

Peter Wohlleben, in his disarmingly candid and unemphatic fashion, begs to differ. He is a forester and environmentalist, who has the care of a forest of venerable beeches in the Rhineland municipality of Hümmel in central Germany, so he knows whereof he speaks. While he does not say so in so many words, he lets us know, in this marvellous book - literally, it is a book of marvels - that in his opinion, and in the opinion of an increasing number of specialists, trees are sentient: they are communal, they care for their young and for their neighbours; they remember, they can learn and they can count; they may even have emotions and feel pain.

Some might dismiss Wohlleben as a sentimentalist and a "tree-hugger", but this would be a grave misapprehension; part of the pleasure of his book is his - literally, again - down-to-earth tone, and drily humorous prose style. Yet in his quiet way he is startlingly radical. He quotes with approval the constitution of Switzerland, which stipulates that citizens must take account "of the dignity of creation when handling animals, plants and other organisms", and declares that, while others may disapprove of this blurring of the distinction between creatures that are alive and objects that are merely living, "I, for one, welcome breaking down the moral barriers between animals and plants".

Among the reasons for our failure to comprehend what remarkable things trees are, aside from our deplorable anthropocentrism - "God made the world for man's use and benefit", the Catechism breezily assures us - is the fact that on average they live their lives about 10 times more slowly than we do, and that they survive for so long. Wohlleben tells of examining a "young" beech in the forest he manages, which had a trunk about a third of an inch in diameter, but which he discovered to be at least 80 years old. Then there is the single small spruce in the Dalarna province of Sweden which researchers found to have been living for what Wohlleben describes as an "absolutely unbelievable" 9,550 years.

The author in his Introduction confesses that when he began his career as a forester he "knew about as much about the hidden life of trees as a butcher knows about the emotional life of animals". Like so many others of his kind in those days, he considered it was necessary to protect the wellbeing of the forest purely for industrial and financial reasons. However, as he grew to know the forest more intimately, he began to understand the complexity of tree life and to follow its immensely subtle ramifications. He also tells us, with a refreshing absence of snobbism, how much he learned from the tourists who came to his forest. "Visitors were enchanted by crooked, gnarled trees I would previously have dismissed because of their low commercial value. Walking with my visitors, I learned to pay attention to more than just the quality of the trees' trunks."

He also benefited from the increase in tree research, especially when Aachen University set up investigative programmes in the forest he manages: "When you know that trees experience pain and have memories and that tree parents live together with their children, then you can no longer just chop them down and disrupt their lives with large machines." He also came to know of the "wood wide web", news of the discovery of which was published in the scientific journal Nature in 1997.

In a "Note from a Forest Scientist" appended to Wohlleben's book, Dr Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology, describes how in the 1990s she and her colleagues at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver unearthed the fact that there is a vast, secret connection between trees by way of fungi that link up individual root systems. Puzzled as to why, in the patch of forest where she was working, the clearing of birches resulted in the decline of nearby Douglas firs, she found that the birches, "like carers in human social networks", were encouraging the growth of the firs by supplying them with some of their own photosynthetic carbon-tree food. It appears, says Wohlleben, that such "nutrient exchange" to help neighbours in need is the forest rule.

Fungi are probably the tree's best friend. For example, when a pine is suffering from a lack of nitrogen, its partner, the splendidly named fungus Laccaria bicolor, or bicoloured deceiver, will release a poison into the soil around the tree's roots to kill off tiny organisms which, in dying, release the nitrogen contained in their bodies. Fungi, says Wohlleben, are "amazing". Amazing they are, and prolific: a fungus in Oregon is estimated to be 2,400 years old, extends over 2,000 acres and weighs 660 tons.

Over the course of his deceptively simple-sounding narrative - translated, it seems, although the publisher chooses not to acknowledge the fact, by Jane Billinghurst - Wohlleben subtly leads us to follow him to his conclusions about the intelligence, resourcefulness and generosity of trees. Again and again he returns to the question of how it is that they can learn, and store what they have learned, since supposedly they do not have what could be called a brain. His guess is that the root system acts as a cognitive organ, and surely he is right. So next time you walk into a forest, keep in mind that you are not alone. And while you're at it, as Wohlleben recommends, "take a closer look at what you might have taken for granted. Slow down, breathe deep, and look around". In other words, be alive to the living things that stand about you on all sides.

John Banville's latest book is Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir

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The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben review: Alive to their roots

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ISBN-13: 978-1771642484 Author: Peter Wohlleben Publisher: Greystone Books Guideline Price: £16.99 Is there a distinction to be made between living and being alive? Certainly the language suggests there is.

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A tree in texas that was struck by lightning. The tree was split in half and set on fire inside. The tree then burnt up.

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Lightning Striking Tree in 4K - Tree Catches on Fire !!!

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A tree that won’t burn & a well that runs dry.. two of the 7 wonders of Fore Valley

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Brutal Murder of Bridget Cleary in 1895 Ireland

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Listen to this episode from Dig: A History Podcast on Spotify. True Crime Series #1 of 4. After Michael Cleary murdered his wife Bridget Cleary, he wandered the Tipperary countryside in his best suit, telling everyone he met that he was going to reclaim her from the fairies.

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Joining Salem Arts Association entitles you to many benefits. You can participate in our exhibits, receive discounts on workshops and events, even save at local businesses.

All are invited to join! Artists performers, writers, art lovers too. No matter how you define your creative spirit there's a membership for you.

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Welcome to the Salem Art Association Salem, MA. The Salem Arts Association, Inc. is an entirely volunteer-run nonprofit arts organization. Salem Arts seeks to bring art, in all its forms, to the community and bring the community, in all its diversity, to the arts in Salem, Massachusetts.

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The 1692 Salem Witch Museum | History, Education, Self-Guided Tours

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The Salem Witch Museum is a museum in Salem, MA about the Witch Trials of 1692. The museum is based on the actual documents of the trials. Plan a visit to check out the scenes, and listen to the accurate narration from the history of the Salem Witch Hunt. Enjoy the guided tours in one of the most hi…

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One of the burying point’s entrance signs

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One of the burying point’s entrance signs

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The words quoted on one of the animations

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Martha Corey accused in the church of being a witch but the young girls.. Her husband Giles pressed to death for denying the existence of witches and therefore his wife couldn't be one... Quotes from 'The Devil in Massachusetts'

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A Brief History of the Salem Witch Trials

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One town’s strange journey from paranoia to pardon

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'...In a recent solo show at the Regional Cultural Centre in Letterkenny, The House and the Tree, O'Kane re-created an attic from his family home into which he placed a short film recording the vernacular architecture of Co. Donegal which is accompanied by a soundtrack of proverbs in the Gaelic language. The installation is completed by a large-scale wall drawing of an oak tree that once sheltered King James 11, also from his homeplace, together with the sawn up trunk of the tree which was killed by lightning. In other words the personal and the public, past and present, royalist and peasant, the real and its representation, nature and culture are all combined in this single installation, through the accomplished use of new and traditional media.'

Catherine Marshall, February 2008

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'...In a recent solo show at the Regional Cultural Centre in Letterkenny, The House and the Tree, O'Kane re-created an attic from his family home into which he placed a short film recording the vernacular architecture of Co. Donegal which is accompanied by a soundtrack of proverbs in the Gaelic language.

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The Old Burying Point, Grave information and about the cemetery

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More About Old Burying Point/Charter Street Cemetery

The Old Burying Point Cemetery is on Charter Street, behind the Peabody Essex Museum, and next to the Witch Trials Memorial.

The tomb of witchcraft trials judge Bartholomew Gedney.

The grave of witchcraft trials judge, John Hathorne.

The grave of Eleanor and William Hollingworth, mother and brother of Mary English, who was accused of witchcraft along with her husband Philip English.

The grave of Mary Higginson, second wife of Reverend John Higginson.

The grave of Nathaniel Mather, brother of Cotton and son of Increase Mather. The stone is by noted Quaker carver William Mumford.

The grave of Samuel Shattuck. Bridget Bishop was accused of bewitching him and causing his declining health.

A cenotaph. The remains of Simon Bradstreet, the last governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, were once here. The remains were "discarded" once the tomb was sold to the Ingersoll-Hathorne family in the late 1700s.

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Charter Street Cemetery | Salem MA Witch Trial Historical Locations

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More About Old Burying Point/Charter Street Cemetery The Old Burying Point Cemetery is on Charter Street, behind the Peabody Essex Museum, and next to the Witch Trials Memorial. The tomb of witchcraft trials judge Bartholomew Gedney. The grave of witchcraft trials judge, John Hathorne.

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Wooden Human-hybrid prints on wooden cutouts

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Vox Materia
Pluck Projects

Vox Materia - the substance of a voice, a voice made palpable, tactile, material. The work for this show hinges on a new intervention into the ideas of expression and obstruction that have been central to Maher's practice. Expression carries within its etymology the idea of something pressed out, under pressure. Pressure and expression are registered here through facture as well as conceptually, through wood relief prints and a suite of small bronze sculptures squeezed from the artist's fist.

Building on her previous practice of engaging with historical and mythological sources as a starting point for material exploration, Maher began the work for Vox Materia by looking at two sources that can be understood in relation to women's histories and struggles for equality, making this body of work something connected to both ancient histories and contemporary debates. The first point of reference was the 12th Century carving of a mermaid by an anonymous sculptor, and the second source was the baroque sculpture of Apollo and Daphne (1622-25) by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (figure 1). Maher has long realised the power of narrative to draw in her viewers, having considered the relationship between femininity and myth throughout her career. With her usual attention to those historical characters that bear on our contemporary conversations, the figures of both the mermaid and Bernini's Daphne, frozen in the moment of transformation, are fecund ones for interpretation, full of mythopoetic potency and violence. However, although these themes are all present, Maher diverges from her previous interventions within narrative to create recalcitrant material objects that remain obdurately unfamiliar.

Mermaid Emerging

'mermaid emerging' was the subject line of an e-mail Alice sent to us during the early stages of this project, containing photographs of her making graphite rubbings at Kilcooley Abbey near Thurles, Co. Tipperary. Struck by the figure, Maher produced a rubbing of the relief, creating an indexical trace of the stonework. In the photographs of this process, we see the trace of the mermaid emerging in striating lines, an index of the shallow profile of the original, rendered in negative to reveal a flattened figure with a skull-like, grimacing face (figure 2). Typical of Maher's interest in complicating representations of femininity in ancient sources and hybrid forms, this mermaid is no temptress. Instead she is pictured as monstrous and restrained, captured by what appears to be a giant manacle around the tail, revealed by the artist's rubbing.

Designed to keep the curatorial team, based between Cork and London, up to date, the 'mermaid emerging' e-mail showed early engagements with site, cultural memory and material trace. In one photograph, the artist has one hand pressed onto the paper and the wall behind it, the other creating the marks that reveal the mermaid's profile. The nature of this transference is worth considering; not a re-rendering, instead it is an index of the curves of the stonework behind, made possible because the stone is flat enough to facilitate a register of the work. The trace made through the repeated scribble of the artist's hand translates the hard, cold stone into a more tactile form. The grainy detail demonstrates the inexact nature of the transfer, gaps of white show through where the stone is flat below and the detail of the mermaid is made ethereal by negative image. For final work that so clearly speaks to the body, it is interesting to think of the graphite rubbing in relation to the wood reliefs and bronzes - the material engagement with the cold, hard surface of the stone to record a fictional body so resonant with other meaning. This gives us a way of thinking about these works that develops through process, updating the artist's on-going engagement with the notion of becoming - the title of her 2012 exhibition hosted by IMMA in Earlsfort Terrace - and inscribing it into the development and evolution of Vox Materia.

The works on show here have not developed directly from the rubbings that Maher made in 2017. Instead, there are two distinct processes at work. The first underlies the strange, creaturely wood relief prints that fill a single wall of the gallery. This new suite of works on paper appears at first like tightly delineated pools, suspended in unrelieved whiteness. Abstract yet insistently physical and densely striated; the forms, overlaid with bright watercolour wash suggest something visceral but not securely human. Exploring shape and gesture through physical movement, the first stage in the process of making these works involved a photographic recording of artist's active body. Maher - interested in considering the body not as a field of representation but instead as one of experience - began the process physically, moving slowly through contorted positions, focusing on the feeling of stretching and shifting. These are the opposite of posed positions: rather than presenting the body to an outside eye, the camera acts as a partial trace of the artist's experience of corporeality (figure 3). What emerges are chronophotographic records that show the artist hunched and stretched, the gestures, translated into a series of still images, offering us a fractional record of an internal and individual exploration of the body. Similar to the graphite rubbing, there is a translation here that stands in relation to its original, but alters its meaning, at a remove from the original process and experience, but entirely affected by it. Looking through the resulting images, Maher selected number to transcribe into pencil drawings. For these, she focused on the silhouette rather than the detail, adding another layer of process that obscures the connection to the image of the body and distances itself from the original movement. In their final stage, the pencil drawings were translated to wood relief prints, creating striated and grained silhouettes which were then hand coloured by the artist (figure 4).

The silhouette has been a feature of Maher's works since 2003, with works such as Poet and Foxtail, followed by her Lectores Mirabiles series for the National Library in 2004 where decorous bodies sprout fantastic, organic appendages, alluding to the

imaginative possibilities liberated by reading, while her 2007 show The Night Garden populated the RHA's Gallagher Gallery with pullulating crowds of Boschian hybrids. A silhouette compresses a three dimensional form into a flat shadow, unalleviated by detail, floating in an unalleviated sea of background. It's an abbreviation, an aide de memoire. It is also linked to the very beginning of art history; Pliny the Elder recounted how the daughter of Butades the potter recorded her lover's profile before he left for war, tracing his shadow cast on the wall in a pencil outline, providing a reminder indexically linked to its original[1]. Against such melancholy beginnings, the origins of the term silhouette are less grand , traced back as it is to the French minister of Finance, Etienne de Silhouette (1709-67), noted for his parsimony in public expenditure[2]. His name was applied to things made cheaply, including inexpensive portraits cut from paper, rather than more elaborate portraits made in oils. Reducing three dimensional objects into flat renderings that elide their detail, the silhouette condenses the subject down to its shadow in a reduction of means and technical acuity, an accessible form of representation. Not quite a folk art, but a hobby of amateurs, use of the silhouette ties in with Maher's investment in media or materials traditionally unvalorised by art history.

Unlike the traced outline or the shape cut from paper, these silhouettes have been translated into a form of relief print. While woodcuts or woodblock prints are traditionally carved, the composition gouged out of the wooden block or plate and then inked and passed through the press, Maher's wood reliefs are different, compact yet undulating forms cut in outline from plywood and unrelieved by carved marks. The glitches and whorls of the wood's surface absorb the ink and are pressed out onto the paper. The marks and patterns don't immediately register as knots or wood grain however: there is something pelagic about them which evokes pools, eddies and rivulets, or the crenulations of a sandy beach at low tide. Something bodily also; the knots suggestive of eyes or ears of navels; orifices where the body opens out to the world - or even something geological; layers of stratification and sedimentation compressed over millennia. The resultant images are insistently physical but obdurately refuse to cohere. They have been rendered strange in their translation from medium to medium, like a Chinese whisper. The outcome is an insistently flattened image that retains the trace of each layer of this process. Not removed, but reduced, the literal pressure of the press that creates the prints can act as a metaphor for the translation of movement into image, as though the artist's physical experiments, the drawn mark and the rendering of the three dimensional plates have all been compressed into a condensed and resonant proposition.

This process of translation is also at work in the bronze forms that sit in the centre of the gallery in a large cabinet, long, low and wedge shaped, so that one looks down into it, as if into a pool. Arrayed in this cabinet are twenty-three small, sinuous objects, slickly patinated. These sculptural forms fit in the hand and were first made from wax, squeezed in Maher's fist, and then dipped again in molten wax to achieve a smooth, slippery finish (figure 5). Each shape then registers the force of her grip, recording the fins and bulges that escape through the gaps in her fist, extruded under pressure. In this way the objects display evidence of the movements and the physical effort that produced them, retaining the memory of her gesture. The process results in simple, primal forms which evoke both sensual pleasure but also a measure of perplexity. As with her 1995 exhibition Familiar, there is a complex dialogue at work between the works on paper and the sculptures. Like the relief prints, these objects also refuse to resolve, or rather, refuse easy identification: they are at once bones or turds, organs or lumps of coral. If we were to pick them up, then would be heavy, smooth and cold; intimate yet leaden and resistant.

In both cases, processes that started out in movement end as determinedly static renderings of abstract shapes: not fleshy or visceral but bodily still. Given the images translation from medium to medium: the photographed body, translated into a hand drawn silhouette, translated again into a shape cut out in wood and then passed through the printing press, the original sense of - or recognition of - the artist's body is obscured, but a sense of embodiment does remain. These works convey an insistent physicality, yet one seeded with ambiguity and ambivalence. Given this, we might ask what kind of experience of embodiment is being communicated here in the fleshy creases and folds, skewed and compressed limbs that split and intersect. The roseate, mottled bronzes too - small and sleek, summoning touch - are they biomorphic? Organic? This does not seem to do justice to their highly polished surfaces that are smooth and pebble like: looking more like objects found but not fully understood, some archaic projectile perhaps, or some trace of a ritual long since forgotten.

Suggestive as they are of other meanings - something we'll explore further below - it is important to dwell on the physicality of the works on display here, particularly on their connection to an absent body made manifest through its trace. The index of Maher's clenching fist in the bronze sculptures and the layers of translation in the wood relief prints from movement to drawing to printing to watercolour, act as residues of the artist's process, one so closely tied to corporeality. Both sets of work register intangible aspects of the body. In the bronze sculptures we see a record of the force it exerts on the wax form, the effect of muscles contracting, compressing a malleable substance to the point of resistance, ending as a document of movement and resilience, cast in bronze as a permanent memorial to this physical relationship between an artist and her materials. In the works on paper, we see a process of translation that offers an unexpected interpretation of in the internal experience of the body, investigating shape, material and form on the basis on an initial exploration of a physical sensation. Those twists and contortions that the artist first experienced end in an image that renders a view of the strangeness of the body when considered with focused attention.

The hybridity of the images suggest creatures on the boundary between human and animals: as hybrid as mermaids, but less specific, more monstrous, less defined; which derives from that focus on the body as felt. In both the knotted, abstract figuration that emerges, and the lumpen traces of a now absent body, there is a rejection of the conventions of the representations of women, a constantly marked and problematic territory. Through offering a view of the female body as a site of interiority, explored from within rather than from the outside, Maher offers a feminist complication of the initial image of the mermaid. Hybridity becomes not a reference to a strange and threatening mystical creature, one that remains external to our everyday experience, but instead describes an excess that is always within the body, as an always present internal experience where sensation suggests meaning, where the distance between the imagined insides of our bodies - the muscles that flex and stretch, the blood that flows, the synapses that spark - and the outside world that requires translation and interpretation.

That this is both a subjective exploration and a gendered one is important. The practice of writing the body (to paraphrase Hélène Cixous' famous call to action) is not new amongst feminist practitioners. Artists have been examining ways to re-imagine the body in art since the advent of the feminist art movement in the 1970s, considering how to visually imagine the female body in light of the sexualisation and objectification that have historically accompanied its imaging. Maher's flattened creaturely forms and petrified lumps can be read within this lineage of art practices, differently inflected as they are by their reference to the ways in which female bodies negotiate space. However, much as this theory has evolved since its first discussions in the 1970s, the female body is no longer imagined as the transhistorical, transcultural phenomenon it was conceived to be in Cixous' first considerations. Instead, Maher's works seek not to represent an amorphous female viscerality but instead are specific to her own body as a woman negotiating the at once vexed and yet increasingly optimistic territory of the female body as it is imagined in contemporary Ireland. For exploring this in more detail, it is necessary to turn to the significance of myth in interpreting these images, which we argue, stand not as a transcultural reverberation, but as a set of parables that relate implicitly to our current political landscape.

Myth in 2018

An engagement with mythic femininity was important to Maher's development of this work, providing a series of conceptual markers through which to frame the project. The mermaid that emerges from beneath Maher's graphite pencil for example, is one that suggests a female figure made monstrous, imbued with a threatening sexuality. Historically understood, the mermaid is a siren that has lost her voice; in some stories, very violently - her tongue ripped out so that she might be granted human legs - a silenced figure that is at once irresistibly seductive and also a harbinger of disaster. Silencing emerges as an important idea underlying this work, not only in the mermaid's lost voice, but also in the other important reference point which informs this work, Apollo and Daphne, the sixteenth century sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

Specifically, it was the dark void presented by Daphne's open mouth, emitting a wordless gasp/scream which stood as the punctum of the work for Maher. Griselda Pollock's essay on the sculpture draws out its mythopoetic significance: Daphne, fleeing from Apollo's violent pursuit, calls out to her father, the river god Peneus to save her from her attacker.[3] Bernini's work famously captures this moment of transformation, as Daphne's soft, fleshy body petrifies into wood, rough bark and snaking roots. This act of rescue is also an act of violence, the hard bark that protects her naked body from Apollo's uninvited touch in Bernini's sculpture also acts to encase her. For Maher, Daphne's gasping/screaming mouth contained within it the abject reality of this tale. Her focus is not on the beautifully carved marble, but the empty space cut in stone that represents both Daphne's cry and the last breath expelled from her transforming body.

How to link these coded references to the baroque sculpture and the 12th century mermaid carving? Both derive from myth, and both involve hybrid states, implying or actually depicting the process of transformation. The reference to myth is helpful for thinking further about the relationship between this work and feminist understandings of the body. In Marina Warner's study on the tropes of popular fairy tale From the Beast to the Blonde she points out that fairy tales such as those by Charles Perrault and Hans Christian Anderson - the Little Mermaid providing a prime example - encrypt procedures of authority from various moments in history, valorising silence as a feminine virtue, and thus encouraging young girls to become passive, silent and obedient.[4] Likewise, when the brothers Grimm collected fairy tales, they tended not to include stories which existed in folklore that featured strong, clever female heroines, and instead gravitated (however consciously is debatable) towards stories with active male protagonists, and passive females.[5] Not only that, but Warner cites Ruth Bottigheimer's analysis of the speech patterns in the Grimms - as the Grimms published their later editions, the female heroines used less and less words, and the female villains spoke more.[6] Thus, she argues, girls tended to subconsciously receive the message that to be worthy and desirable like the female heroines in the stories, they must be quiet. Myth then stands as a way of thinking about how gendered codes of behaviour and expectation are communicated socially not as ideological assertions that demand particular types of behaviour and forbid others, but instead as universal truths related to long standing historical knowledge. As Griselda Pollock reminds us, 'myth is [...] at root a fable of the tensions in culture, translating into stories the rules of conduct of a social group or a cultural formation'[7].

However, the ways in which this myth plays out in contemporary culture are not predictable as Ashley King Scheu identifies. In her study of Simone de Beauvoir's interest in myth in her writings, she points to the ways in which mythological and fantastical renderings of femininity feature in the author's recollections of her childhood, how, rather than silencing Beauvoir and her sister, instead they would engage with their narratives, '[taking] up the well-known stories of martyrs and wicked stepmothers and manipulat[ing] them, recreating their stories just as they pleased.[8] Scheu excerpts Beauvoir's descriptions of the effects of this: 'Just when the silence, the shadows, the boredom of the bourgeois buildings invaded the vestibule, I would unleash my fantasies: we would sometimes bring them into being [...] enthusiastically supported by gestures and words, and sometimes, as we caught each other in our spell, we would succeed in taking flight from this world, up to that moment when an imperious voice would call us back to reality'[9] Even patriarchal myths therefore, though unquestionably formative, are not necessarily determining: their effects are intangible and their results unexpected. So it is for Maher and for women who were, like her, raised in 1960s and '70s Ireland. Rejecting the patriarchal narratives of conservative Catholicism and insisting on the importance of women's voices, Maher was one of a number of artists, such as Pauline Cummins, Alannah O'Kelly and Anne Tallentire among others, who fought for recognition not only of individual female practitioners, but of the importance of recognising and representing female experience. Her association in the late 1980s and 90s with the Women Artists Action Group formed in Dublin in 1987, and with the Northern Ireland Women's Action Group formed in Belfast the same year, contributed to a movement that sought to both recognise the pernicious nature of being silenced and to counteract its effects through solidarity. The need to counter the exclusion of women in supposedly defining exhibitions such as Directions Out in the Douglas Hyde and Making Sense: 10 Painters, 1963-1983 at the Project Arts Centre, (both held in 1987), meant mounting an urgent challenge to the institutional silencing of women through activism and in practice, creating group shows, agitating for more inclusion and recognition of women artists, and speaking directly as well as abstractly on women's issues. This was made more urgent by the social and political climate of the time: the Eighth Amendment had been enshrined in the referendum of 1983 and there was everywhere the evidence of society's violence against women with the false accusation and subsequent harassment of Joanne Hayes in the Kerry Babies case and the death of Ann Lovett both recent memories and Magdalene Laundries not yet a thing of the past.

2018 however, is a different moment. Although at risk of speaking from within one of those bubbles of optimism that emerge frequently but fleetingly in the history of the women's movement; from our position as curators, we feel resonances between this work and a moment in which women are being considered not for their silence, but for speaking out [10]. Now, in a time of 'Nevertheless, she persisted', with #MeToo still raging and the referendum on the 8th amendment scheduled to take place later this year, the idea of being silenced is under attack like never before. Silence from a feminist position is no longer the condition against which we must struggle but instead is increasingly the condition of a recent and shameful past. Speaking out against sexual violence, on the murderous histories of Tuam and the other Mother and Baby homes around the country, on the cruelty of denying safe, legal abortion to women, women's voices are voluble, angry and demanding change. Certainly none of this is new, but there is a ground swell of mainstream attention, a recognition of the realities of these sufferings in the media, and a sense of collectivism and support that provide hope that the issues raised will no longer be side-lined.

Looking at the development of Maher's engagement with myth throughout her practice registers this change in mood: there is a shift in the role of the mythic and the nature of its relationship to the contemporary world. As David Lloyd argued in his 2012 essay on her practice, this has always been a thread in Maher's work, and he points to the ways in which she has engaged with mythology as a way to explore contemporary society since her early work such as Bee Dress (1994) and Nettle Coat (1995). Focusing on the film Cassandra's Necklace (2012), he considers the way in which the mythic in Maher's work: something he describes as being 'not frozen or tied to fixed archetypes but opens corridors between past and future, turning every moment of awareness into a space of transition or an opening into labyrinths of allusion' - is a kind of rhythm brought into the practice, the 'dissonant, syncopated quality of the mythic' that underpins narratives of transformation[11]. In Vox Materia however, though still legibly in line with Lloyd's reading of the work, the nature of the rhythm of myth and the kind of transformation that is registered has shifted. The mermaid's silence and Daphne's final scream are not presented to us through a subverted imagining or rendered in the folk materials Lloyd identifies as associated with a 'care for materiality' which suggests a 'steady attention to the borderlands at which artifice rubs up against the natural.'[12] Instead of foregrounding the uncanny presence of this relationship between the natural and the artificial, the objects and the images on display are recalcitrant in their materiality: insistent, meaningful and stark. The shifts and transformations that dominate Maher's film drawing The Music of Things (The Double) (2009) or the dusty charcoal and chalk surfaces of drawings featured in the Glorious Maids of the Charnel House (2016) are no longer visible. Instead, the images on display here are resolute, defined not by their reference to other works, but stand as autonomous statements.

Compare the relief prints and bronze objects to a work such as Double Venus (2005), in which two identical Venuses are linked by a muscular snake-like protrusion emerging from the back of their heads (figure 11). The image that Maher works from refers back to Canova's casts of classical Greek and Roman statuary, an over-determined visual language that suggests multiple ideological and aesthetic connections. In Vox Materia, although Daphne and the mermaid are present conceptually, these ideas are worked through the artist's body instead, creating a new, strange language that no longer relies on a pre-given visual language and instead makes something new, and, despite its obscurity, declarative. Moving away from a visual language of questioning and indeterminacy, this feels more like a statement.

Given Maher's increasing involvement in politics, perhaps this concern comes as no surprise. Much of her energies in recent years have been dedicated to contributing to the Artists Campaign to Repeal the 8th Amendment, co-founded with Cecily Brennan, Eithne Jordan and Paula Meehan in 2015. Working with artists including Rachel Fallon, Aine Phillips, Breda Mayock and Sarah Cullen the group created banners to work as agit-prop artefacts designed to rally supporters and convince the undecided (figure 6). In this very different, collective and political project, to which Maher contributes, imagery rendered in textiles has been used to create statements for protest, explicitly rendering the injustice of the 8th Amendment in visual form (figure 6). Within this context of women's increasing vociferousness, we can consider the new work for Vox Materia, its insistent materiality, its density and unapologetic viscerality. Whether this is a turning point for the historical silencing of women remains to be seen, whether the mythopoetic narratives associated with femininity are under threat is uncertain, but perhaps what we can see here is an optimism that figures in the materials refusing the tropes of disappearance and transformation that figure in the myths that inspire them. Not the vanishing of a woman bound and destroyed by the threat of rape, nor the silencing of the hybrid creature: instead bodies emerge in unexpected and insistent forms, unapologetic and unafraid, voice is made material, hard and heavy.. Not so much a threat made from below, or a play with still unquestionably dominant patriarchal meanings, Vox Materia figures the persistent, irreducible female voice in a moment where it feels like its time might finally have come. Still abstract and bodily, consistent with the long lineage of its development, it follows that such a statement would come from an artist who has for decades been one of the leading actors for feminism in the arts both internationally, but particularly in Ireland. Reflecting the ways in which the register of female voices have changed from angrily seeking acknowledgement, to a collective insistence based on solidarity, we can only hope that this work will sit in relation to wider changes in our political present, standing as a record of the moment where the silenced female voice asserted itself with renewed force.

[1] David Rosand, Drawing Acts: Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 4ff.

[2] On the history of the cut-out silhouette portrait, see E. Nevill Jackson, The History of Silhouettes (London: Connoisseur, 1911)

[3] Griselda Pollock, 'Gasping at violence: the trauma of gender', After-affects/After-images: Trauma and aesthetic transformation in the virtual feminist museum, (Manchester University Press: Manchester & New York, 2013), pp 1-37, p. 55

[4] Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers, (New York: Farrow, Strauss and Giraud, 1994), p. 208

[5] Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, p. 394

[6] Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, p. 394

[7] Griselda Pollock, 'Gasping at violence: the trauma of gender', After-affects/After-images: Trauma and aesthetic transformation in the virtual feminist museum, (Manchester University Press: Manchester & New York, 2013), pp 1-37, p. 55

[8] Ashley King Scheu, 'Walking in a Man's World: Myth, Literature and the Interpretation of Simone de Beauvoir's the Second Sex', Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) pp. 81 -94, p. 87

[9] Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, trans. James Kirkup (Cleveland, OH: World,1959) p. 61 In Scheu, 'Walking in a Man's World', 87

[10] It bears noting that this tone of optimism is one that caused some nervousness when we were drafting this essay. In our discussion, we talked about whether optimism was called for, particularly when feminism has often gathered momentum in ways similar to that which we are currently experiencing. There have been many times before where it has seemed like some palpable change is coming, only to see the concerted response of patriarchal forces that further entrench their own legislative and cultural perspective (we could see the initial introduction of the Eighth Amendment as one such example). However, whilst aware of the risk of representing a moment of unfulfilled optimism - and mindful that we come from a generation of women privileged enough not to have fought before to see our efforts frustrated - as curators we agreed that this hope was to us worth registering as a small record of our current moment. Activism, after all, is a form of optimism, therefore we wanted to do justice to those people fighting for our human rights and to the hope they make possible. We felt it important to acknowledge the promise this moment in early 2018 offers, even if there is a retrenchment, the act of speaking out has forced cracks into a system that may - we believe will - make change possible.

[11] David Lloyd, 'Cassandra's Smile: On Alice Maher's Metamorphosis', in Sean Kissane (ed) Becoming: Alice Maher (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2012), pp.66-83, p. 72

[12] Lloyd, 'Cassandra's Smile'. 69

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Vox Materia Pluck Projects Vox Materia - the substance of a voice, a voice made palpable, tactile, material. The work for this show hinges on a new intervention into the ideas of expression and obstruction that have been central to Maher's practice. Expression carries within its etymology the idea of something pressed out, under pressure.

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William Kentridge: transformation with animation

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Artist William Kentridge talks about his process of repeatedly erasing and reworking charcoal drawings to create his well-known stop-motion animated films.

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https://www.visualcarlow.ie/exhibitions/info/irish-tree-alphabet

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Video art emerged in the late 60s and early 70s, and took off with the appearance of the portable video recorder. The range of technologies and techniques employed in the making of video art has become infinitely more varied since then. Today this form of art, which relies on moving images, comprising video and often audio data, is firmly established as an essential part of the contemporary art world. At the same time, it is not the most easily accessible medium for a large part of the audience - more often than not, visitors come up to a screen in an exhibition, linger for a minute and move on. Video art demands serious engagement with the work, if only for the sheer amount of time it requests from the viewer's attention. In the twenty-first century context of constant visual bombardment and fast image consumption, such prolonged concentration on a work of art which does not promise the unravelling of a plot seems like a lot to ask. But by this roundabout way of employing media which is steeped in contemporary reality, artists coax us back into the contemplation which had been associated with the experience of visual art for centuries. In this series of articles, tn2 would like to accompany you in looking at a few selected pieces, giving you a taster of the pleasure that video art can be.

Alice Maher's Sleep (2009) is one of a group of "video drawings" produced by the artist between 2009 and 2011, some of which could be seen in her major mid-career retrospective earlier this year at IMMA's temporary home in Earlsfort Terrace. These video drawings differ distinctly from animation - rather than drawing each frame on a separate page, the artist manipulates and reworks the same sheet of paper, scanning selected stages in the transformation of the image. The emphatically analogue technique of erasure stands in contrast to the digital technology employed in putting the work together - parts of the pencil drawing are rubbed out, leaving a trace on the paper, a shadow of memory. The page is a palimpsest from the start - it bears the signs of earlier drawings, which are reused at different stages of the transformation, as if for convenience. Such constant erasure, together with the looped display of the video (which can be easily replicated with the clip available online) serve to put forth the processual, performative aspect of drawing, which is normally left in the backstage of the artist's studio. It also rejects, in a sense, the commodification of the art object, as the successive drawings are erased, immaterialised.

There is no rational logic to the images which replace one another, yet they seem to be guided by an intuitive logic, that which belongs to ancient myths. Ovidian metamorphoses inevitably come to mind, among the many references contained within the work. As the video continues its loop, the allusions become more evident and multiply: the erotic pursuits of Zeus in animal guises, the uncanny world of Bosch's hybrid creatures, the Surrealists' fascination with the disquieting strangeness of the classical bust... All that mixed in with modern denim-clothed people, and executed in a style of drawing which by its matter-of-fact simplicity makes the fantastic transformations appear almost normal. There is no drama here, rather, according to David Lloyd, an "inconsequentness and abruptness" noted by Douglas Hyde when describing the specific quality of the folk mind. The title - Sleep - might suggest another explanation for the hypnotic unfolding of metaphoric and metonymical substitutions on the screen: they follow the inexorable logic of the dream.

Sound is a crucial element in Maher's video drawings, whose soundtracks are worked out by composer Trevor Knight in close collaboration with the artist. In Sleep, the steady chanting of inarticulate syllables and hums places the action in the realm of the nonsensical, but is also reminiscent of some strange ritual, ominous piano notes add a sense of apprehension. The sound accounts for the strong impact of the unexpected twists and turns, some of which excite a burst of nervous laughter. Aesthetic appeal combines with intellectual intrigue posed by the wealth of cultural allusions which this work is steeped in, and also with that curious attraction of the strange and the abject, to produce a truly enchanting piece of art.
To see more examples of Maher's work, please visit www.alicemaher.com

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The Moving Images of Art: Sleep by Alice Maher | TN2 Magazine

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This text will be replaced WORDS: GABIJA PURLYTĖ Video art emerged in the late 60s and early 70s, and took off with the appearance of the portable video recorder. The range of technologies and techniques employed in the making of video ...

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Streets of Salem blog entry on the relationship of witches and trees - helped me figure out the way I was connecting the witches and trees in my head.

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It strikes me that there are many historical, folkloric, and cultural connections between witches and trees: witches are often described and depicted as gathering under, hanging from, and riding on branches of trees, "witches' broom" is a tree disease or deformity, the rowan tree was traditionally associated with the warding off of witches. I'm leaving aside the arboreal associations of modern witchcraft. There's something about the forest primeval in general, and trees in particular, that creates an environment of secrecy and sorcery: this was a setting that was cultivated by Renaissance etchers and resurrected by Victorian illustrators. The trees are often spindly, haggard, misshapen, and barren, like the women underneath them.
Daniel Hopfer, Gib Frid (Let me Go), early 16th century etching, British Museum; Edward Gurden Dalziel, illustration from Judy Magazine, 13 February 1878, British Museum; Arthur Rackham, 'The Witches Sabbath' illustration for 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow', George Harrap & Co, 1928.
The association seems to be strongest in the folklore associated with Italian witchcraft. In Benevento, the "City of Witches" (occasionally referenced as the "Italian Salem"), witches from all over the world were said to gather annually under a storied walnut tree-a tree that was definitely fruitful. It's an age-old, deeply-rooted story whose origins seem impossible to trace (at least for a short blog post), but the streghe under the walnut tree have certainly inspired a variety of cultural expressions and commodities, from works of art to musical compositions to the famous Strega digestif, manufactured right in Benevento since 1860.
G uglielmo della Porta, The Witches at the Walnut Tree of Benevento, pen and ink drawing, mid 16th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Lithographed songsheet for Paganini's Dance of the Witches, 1830s, British Museum; Strega label and walnut tree outside the Alberti factory in Benevento.
The Massa Marittima Mural and detail; you can see it in situ here, and read more about its symbolism here.
To the north there is another representation of witches gathered under a fertile tree: the famous mural of Massa Maritimma, dating from the mid- to late 13th century and uncovered in 2000. Situated on a wall in the town center enclosing the communal "Fountain of Abundance", this tree bears strange fruit: phalluses which the women below are picking and gathering. The discovery of the obscene (???) mural was shocking for some (and its subsequent cleaning remains controversial-you can read about it here), but not to anyone who has any familiarity with the (the " Witches' Hammer) a practical guide to identifying, detecting and prosecuting witches published in 1487. Due to its sheer popularity, which is evidenced by many editions and translations, most historians believe that the Malleus contributed to the intensification of witch-hunting in the early modern era, though its exact role is open to debate. It seems pretty clear to me that the book's popularity is based in its accessibility, and the sensationalistic anecdotes that its authors (Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger-probably more the former than the latter) include, among them oft-cited passages about witches stealing men's "virile members" and hiding them in nests nestled in the branches of trees.

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It strikes me that there are many historical, folkloric, and cultural connections between witches and trees: witches are often described and depicted as gathering under, hanging from, and riding on branches of trees, "witches' broom" is a tree disease or deformity, the rowan tree was traditionally associated with the warding off of witches.

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Ombre and familiar

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“Governor Bradstreet” - name on the grave yard sign 

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“Governor Bradstreet” - name on the grave yard sign 

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Questioning over the actual location of Bradstreet’s corpse. Simon’s son Benjamin was accused o witchcraft by a dog barking at him, and resulted in Benjamin fleeing to New York to avoid persecution.

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Lately I've become a bit fixated on Simon Bradstreet, the last governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, primarily because of the spectacular Salem house in which he lived-and died. So much so that when I realized the anniversary of his death date (in 1697) was yesterday, I ran over to look at his grave in Salem's oldest cemetery, the Old Burying Point. But when I got there, I realized that it wasn't there: there's a cenotaph, but no grave and no body. Where is it? No one really seems to know!

There are clues to the whereabouts of Simon Bradstreet's body in the Phillips Library, and also, of course, in the graveyard. The most serious inquiry was initiated by Robert Rantoul, a Mayor of Salem, President of the Essex Institute, and someone who addressed many issues of his time and before, and published in an 1892 article in the There is a strong tone of righteousness in this piece, which begins with the statement that Bradstreet's tomb is now, be the title good or bad, in possession of parties alien to the Bradstreet line, and has been so held for a century, and the representatives of these claimants not unnaturally object to all interference with their long-established rights of possession. I have to admit I did not know that cemetery plots, including those that had been "occupied", were actually sold like any other piece of property, but that is what seems to have happened: Rantoul lays out all of the historical facts which testify to Bradstreet's burial on Charter Street, and then presents the surprising revelation that in 1798 the tomb seems to have changed hands according to a bill of sale endorsed by Colonel Benjamin Bickman which states that Major John Hathorne and Captain Samuel Ingersoll bou't of Benjamin Pickman....a tomb in the burying point (so called)....formerly the Property of Governor Bradstreet. Jump forward a century, to Rantoul's time and a major investigation carried out by a special committee comprised of members of the Salem City Council and Essex Institute along with "health officers, accomplished antiquarians, and local historians", which did not seem to be able to locate the remains of Governor Bradstreet. Rantoul leaves us with the mystery, but also some intriguing details: members of the Hathorne family had protested the disturbance of their tomb, and one contemporary observer commented that an ancestor of Nathaniel Hawthorne having taken possession, with no further scruple cleaned out the tomb, throwing the remains of the old Governor and his family into a hole not far away". And there we are-but where is Bradstreet?

The Bradstreet Tomb today and in its original location in the 1890s (photograph by Frank Cousins @ Digital Commonwealth). Cotton Mather's epitaph for Bradstreet seems particularly apt: "Here lies New England's Father! Woe the day! How mingles mightiest dust with meaner clay!"

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Simon Bradstreet's Body - streetsofsalem

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Lately I've become a bit fixated on Simon Bradstreet, the last governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, primarily because of the spectacular Salem house in which he lived-and died. So much so that when I realized the anniversary of his death date (in 1697) was yesterday, I ran over to look at his grave in ...

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One of the names featured on the entrance to the burying point

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I've always admired these three portraits of women from the Lynde family: the wife and daughters of Benjamin Lynde Jr., chief justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature and one of the justices who presided over the trial of Captain Thomas Preston following the Boston Massacre. As the portraits were produced by very esteemed and in-demand artists, their existence seems to me to represent the extreme wealth and prestige of the family, and by extension Salem, with which they were all identified. But since I've had my "enslavement enlightenment" lightbulb moment, I find I can't look at them in the same way I used to: a little personal perspective on a challenge faced by many towns, cities, and universities these days. I can't admire the rich folds of velvet and silk swathing these women without thinking of their other "possessions".

Maybe I can look at the silk without guilt: there are references to at least two enslaved men in the various accounts of Justice Lynde's household, implicating his wife Mary (Bowles) Lynde (1709-91), but I do not know if the Lynde's two daughters, Mary Lynde Oliver (1733-1807) and Lydia Lynde Walter (1741-1798) are so-tainted. As Mary Jr. was married to a gentleman scientist (Andrew Oliver) and Lydia married the Rector of Trinity Church in Boston (the Reverend William Walter), I would like to think that they despised the institution and practice of slavery, but that might be anachronistic wishful thinking on my part as science, religion, and slavery seem to be compatible in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Mary's 1751 diary is among other Oliver collections at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and I bet that would yield some clues. Slavery was abolished in Massachusetts during the lifetimes of all of these women, and it would be interesting to know their reactions to that epic event. While the two Marys led much of their lives in the Lynde family home on the corner of Essex and Liberty Streets (demolished in 1836, and then of course the PEM engulfed that latter so that no longer exists either) in Salem, Lydia lived with her husband in Boston until 1776 when they decamped for Nova Scotia with other Loyalists, to return only in 1791. While The Loyalists of Massachusetts described both of Benjamin Lynde's sons-in-law as "staunch Loyalists", I'm just not sure that is the case with Andrew Oliver, Mary's husband. He was certainly part of a conspicuous Loyalist family as his father was the last royal Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts and his uncle its last royal Chief Justice, but he seems to have been more passionate about science than politics and he and Mary remained in Salem during the Revolution.

At least I think they did: they're pretty quiet, only emerging towards the end of the war as executors (she with her maiden name) of her father's estate. I'd like to think that Mary and Andrew fulfilled the dictates of Benjamin Lynde Jr.'s will and freed his long-term "man" Primus joyfully, and on the most generous of terms. No advertisements for lost or runaway humans before that, thank goodness, only books. We do get some insights into Mary's character from the ever-quotable Reverend Bentley, although they are not very complimentary: she was "of real piety but not of that mind which could have rendered her a fit companion for her husband who took a high rank in American Literature. She was feeble limited in her enquiries, & a century too late in her manners." ( Diary II, 335-6).

(2002) as well as the Smithsonian's Addendum: There is a fourth portrait of a Lynde lady: Benjamin Lynde Jr.'s mother, Mary Browne Lynde, in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum: I don't remember ever seeing it, but it is featured in Lorinda Goodwin's book An Archaeology of Manners: The Polite World of the Merchant Elite of Colonial Massachusetts catalog of American portraits, where it is attributed to none other than Sir Godfrey Kneller, the "Principal Painter" of the late Stuart courts. It is quite something to think of a Salem girl being painted by the same artist who portrayed James II, William and Mary, Anne, Locke and Newton! There is no online catalog of its object collections on the PEM website, so I can't check out their attribution, though Goodwin lists it as unattributed. Mrs. Lynde Sr. appears to have been a very beautiful woman, but not only were her father and husband slave owners, she lived in an age in which slavery became integrated inextricably with the British Atlantic Empire. In 1713 Britain was granted the asiento, the exclusive contract to supply the Spanish American colonies with slaves, in the treaty that ended the War of the Spanish Succession, thus enabling its domination of the Atlantic Slave Trade for the rest of the eighteenth century.

Two Kneller portraits? Mary Browne Lynde and Princess Anne before her accession in 1702, Sir Godfrey Kneller, Chirk Castle © National Trust. After the asiento was granted to Great Britain by the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht, the South Sea Company, in which both Anne and her successor George I were large shareholders, was awarded the contract to supply slaves to Spain's colonies.

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The Lynde Ladies of Salem - streetsofsalem

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I've always admired these three portraits of women from the Lynde family: the wife and daughters of Benjamin Lynde Jr., chief justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature and one of the justices who presided over the trial of Captain Thomas Preston following the Boston Massacre.

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Witches at Their Incantations of Salvator Rosa

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Documents from the witch trials

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In the center is a simple patch of grass and locust trees, which are thought to be the type of tree that may have been used for the hangings. A dirt path runs beside the benches for visitors to walk and reflect.

Silently watching from just over the wall are the gravestones in the adjacent Old Burying Point Cemetery, the oldest cemetery in Salem and one of the oldest in the United States. Among the interred are witch trials magistrates John Hathorne and Bartholomew Gedney.

The Salem Witch Trials Tercentenary Committee was established by the Mayor of the City of Salem on April 22, 1986, with a principle intention of creating a permanent memorial to the victims of the witch trials.

A public design competition, juried by five noted professionals, resulted in 246 entrants. The winning entry, designed by Maggie Smith and James Cutler of Bainbridge Island, Washington, was presented to the press and public by renowned playwright Arthur Miller on November 14, 1991. Among the notable works by Miller is The Crucible, which used the Salem Witch Trials as an allegory for the McCarthyism of the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The Witch Trials Memorial was dedicated on August 5, 1992 by Nobel Laureate, Holocaust survivor, and author Elie Wiesel, who noted, "If I can't stop all of the hate all over the world in all of the people, I can stop it in one place within me," adding, "We still have our Salems."

This quiet and peaceful memorial, located in the very center of Salem, provides a place for people to pay their respects, to reflect on tolerance and understanding, and to remember the inspiring stories of personal courage revealed in 1692.
24 Liberty Street, next to the Old Burying Point Cemetery
"It is important that people think about real human suffering caused by witchcraft hysteria and the lessons that are to be learned from that dark period in the history of this city and this country" -Memorial designers James Cutler and Maggie Smith

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Witch Trials Memorial | Salem Witch Museum

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This area serves as a memorial to those accused who were tried and executed for having practiced witchcraft. Tourists can walk through the memorial, staying on the path to reflect upon the happenings of the Salem Witch Trials, and can pay their respects by leaving flowers on the stones of those who are honored there.

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Phoenix Park split tree

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The Salem Witch trials occupy a large space in the American imagination. From Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Hocus Pocus , Arthur Miller to American Horror Story , American pop culture is saturated in retellings of this horrifying episode in colonial history. It is easy to feel like we've long known everything there is to know about it.

But over the last 10 years, historians have been hard at work reexamining the documentary evidence of the trials. While I was researching the event for my new unit of Women and the American Story , Settler Colonialism to Revolution, 1692-1783 (debuting November 5), I learned a number of fascinating new facts that have recontextualized how I teach this history.

Nearly everything we think we know about Tituba is wrong.

The figure of Tituba looms large in the story of the Salem Witch trials. In the popular narrative of the trials, she is the black woman enslaved by Rev. Samuel Parris. Her stories of African magic and mythology plant the idea of witchcraft in the impressionable minds of Parris's young daughter and niece. In some retellings, Tituba actually performs small acts of magic for the girls to entertain them on long winter evenings.

The actual Tituba bore no resemblance to this popular construction. In fact, Tituba was a Native woman, not black. Every existing historical account of the trials refers to her as a Native woman, and it was not until the 19 th century that she was reinvented. It is important to correct this misidentification, because the myth that she was black perpetuates the erasure of Native enslavement in the New England colonies.

Tituba did belong to the Parris household, but there is no evidence that she told stories or performed magic for the household's young women. This was another 19th-century fabrication to enliven the story. Tituba was the first woman to confess to practicing witchcraft in Salem, and her graphic confession was the spark that lit the flames of the hysteria. But later in her life, Tituba revealed that she had confessed only because Parris beat her until she agreed to do as he said.

The wide disparity between the life of the real Tituba and the mythology that has grown up around her is a useful example of how popular depictions of historical events can become distorted over time. For Settler Colonialism to Revolution, 1692-1783 , I wrote a new biography of Tituba that takes current historical thinking into account (also available November 5, like the unit!). Asking students to compare the factual history of Tituba with popular depictions teaches a valuable lesson about taking all popular depictions of history with a grain of salt, and the importance of always returning to the source.

The Salem witch hysteria was not an isolated incident.

A lot of the conversation around the Salem Witch Trials is centered around figuring out how such a hysteria could have happened in the first place. Was it boredom? Cold weather? Ergot poisoning?

The trouble is, most of these theories treat the Salem hysteria as an isolated incident, when in fact it was one episode of a much larger trend that swept both Europe and the American colonies. Witch trials and executions took place in Europe from the mid-1500s, and what happened in Salem was not even the first large-scale panic in the Americas. Eleven accused witches were executed in Connecticut between 1647 and 1697 and 10 were executed in Bermuda between 1651 and 1655. Although these other such hysterias did not unfold as rapidly as the Salem witch trials, their existence indicates that Salem was not a one-time fluke. They were part of the larger European cultural landscape, and the causes were probably not so simple as a case of bad grain. Which brings us to our final point...

There were other colonial hysterias.

Only 49 years after the outbreak of the Salem witch hysteria, the people of New York City panicked over rumors of a possible slave uprising. Hundreds of men and women were arrested on hearsay evidence given by other accused conspirators, and before the end of summer 1741, thirty-four people had been executed and seventy enslaved people had been deported to the Caribbean colonies. The parallels to Salem witch trials are startling, and that isn't just historical hindsight talking: at the height of the trials New York governor Cadwallader Colden received an anonymous letter urging him to reflect on the Salem Witch Trials and put an end to the current madness. To read an account of a black woman's experience of these events, check out Settler Colonialism and Revolution, 1692-1783 when it goes live on November 5.

The comparisons between these two events offer tantalizing possibilities for further research and debate. What was it about life in Europe and the American colonies that spawned these kinds of crises? Was this happening on other continents or in other cultures? Have humans moved past this kind of madness, or have we simply evolved our responses to match the world we live in?

Overall, my research into the Salem witch trials reinforced that it is our job as educators to be sure we are staying abreast of the most recent developments in historical research, and to make sure we aren't perpetuating the inaccuracies of popular culture served up as history. The truth is always more interesting than fiction, and it's a lot more fun to learn the facts for yourself.
Written by Allyson Schettino, Associate Director of School Programs, New-York Historical Society

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The Salem Witch Trials: The Real History Behind One of the Most Terrifying Events in Colonial History - Women at the Center

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The Salem Witch trials occupy a large space in the American imagination. From Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Hocus Pocus, Arthur Miller to American Horror Story, American pop culture is saturated in retellings of this horrifying episode in colonial history. It is easy to feel like we've long known everything there is to know about it....

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Although she studied painting and printmaking at the Atlanta College of Art and the Rhode Island School of Design, Kara Walker is best known for her large-scale, cut-paper installations. Her silhouettes are a direct reference to a popular art form of the nineteenth century, coincident with slavery. Their violent, often sexual imagery is drawn from folk, literary, and visual traditions. Typically arranged as a series of nonlinear narrative vignettes, they retell the history of racism in America. The traditional rendering of silhouettes in black and white also reflects racism's visual component. While evoking the past, they efface individual details to create figures that are both stereotypes and archetypes. The artist explains, "The silhouette says a lot with very little information, but that's also what the stereotype does. So I saw the silhouette and the stereotype as linked. Of course, while the stereotype, or the emblem, can communicate with a lot of people, and a lot of people can understand it, the other side of this is that it also reduces difference, reduces diversity to that stereotype."

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Although she studied painting and printmaking at the Atlanta College of Art and the Rhode Island School of Design, Kara Walker is best known for her large-scale, cut-paper installations. Her silhouettes are a direct reference to a popular art form of the nineteenth century, coincident with slavery.

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Artist in instagram I like. Large drawings done by charcoal and wash

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Pinterest result

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Instagram sourced. Large charcoal and wash drawings

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Vogue asked a group of leaders, innovators, and creative talents to tell us what hope means to them now-and why it's more essential than ever before.

IT'S taken me weeks to sit down and try to explain these watercolors. But weeks I have, time aplenty. These are selected from a group of modest-size drawings, each one containing a kernel of my emotional state at the time of their making. I am always reflecting on the state of current events and the overlap of the historical and the mythic-but I realize today that explaining is not needed, as we live in a world of 24/7 explanations, of everyone talking at once.

Sitting down to make an intimate drawing is a conversation, a way of listening to what's grumbling inside my body, and an attempt to transmit, nonverbally, an experience of being. It's a hopeful act: an attentive and often surprising exercise I forget to do for long stretches. But when the world concentrates so much violence, ignorance, and mind games into little digital devices we are compelled to carry, I am grateful to have this simple analog practice at my fingertips.

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Vogue asked a group of leaders, innovators, and creative talents to tell us what hope means to them now-and why it's more essential than ever before. IT'S taken me weeks to sit down and try to explain these watercolors. But weeks I have, time aplenty.

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Red chalk and wash.

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Beautiful charcoal drawings of trees, large scale too. The dark atmosphere from the wash of charcoal is very effective, atmosphere I would like to achieve in lighting Slides of animation. They add a Dark and dramatic touch

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Still, Driscoll said: "This is part of our history, and this is an opportunity for us to be honest about what took place."

The quest to confirm the precise spot of the hangings started in 2010, though it was not the first time historians examined the question, said Emerson "Tad" Baker, a Salem State University professor who helped pinpoint the location.

While there are about 1,000 records detailing the Salem witch trials, Baker said information about the executions is scant. Historians have found no evidence that gallows were constructed and surmise the accused witches were hung from tree branches, he said.

All 19 people who were executed by hanging during the witch trials are believed to have died at Proctor's Ledge; five others accused of witchcraft died in jail, and one was crushed to death.

They focused their inquiry initially on Gallows Hill, where many believed the accused witches met their death at the peak. But the researchers concluded that the hangings happened closer to the base of the hill, on the spot known as Proctor's Ledge.

They reached this conclusion by using eyewitness accounts from the time of the hangings, aerial photography of Gallows Hill, and images of the area generated with advanced mapping technology, the researchers said.

First, they determined where the eyewitnesses were when they saw the executions.

The researchers relied on the work of Sidney Perley, a lawyer and historian who wrote about Salem history, said author Marilynne Roach, a member of the research team.

"He must have read every deed and will in the courthouse," she said. "He's a very good source."

In an article published in 1921, Perley cited a letter written in 1791 by "Dr. Holyoke." The letter described a story told by John Symonds, who was born the year the hangings occurred.

"He has told me that his nurse had often told him, that, while she was attending his mother at the time she lay in with him, she saw, from the chamber windows, those unhappy people hanging on Gallows' Hill, who were executed for witches by the delusion of the times," the letter read.

Another description came from Rebecca Eames, a Boxford resident hauled into Salem for questioning Aug. 19, 1692, the same day five executions took place.

Eames's guards escorted her along Boston Road, below Proctor's Ledge, the researchers said. As they approached the courthouse, the guards came upon the hangings and left Eames at a nearby house while they watched the executions.

Eames later told the magistrate she was at "the house below the hill" and saw some "folks" at the execution. Roach determined the house Eames cited was probably the McCarter residence or one of its neighbors on Boston Street.

Once researchers established the vantage points for the eyewitness accounts, they turned to the mapping technology and aerial photography.

They learned the eyewitnesses could not have seen the top of Gallows Hill from where they observed the executions, but they could see Proctor's Ledge, located in between what is now Proctor and Pope streets.

Their inquiry also concluded no victims are buried at Proctor's Ledge, the researchers said.

"I just get this tremendous sense of history here and also kind of the burden of that history in Salem," Baker said.

At the time of the hangings, Proctor's Ledge was public land where residents could let sheep graze, Baker said. It is named for Thorndike Proctor, who purchased land there during the 18th century. He is a descendant of a witch trial victim, John Proctor.

Given that executions then were meant "to serve as an example of what happens to people who break the law," the highly visible site was logical, Baker said.

The inquiry also found Salem had considered erecting a tribute to witch trial victims on Gallows Hill going back more than a century.

Plans for a memorial there were devised in 1892 and Salem purchased a strip of land at Proctor's Ledge in 1936 to construct a park, Baker said. Neither proposal went anywhere.

Baker said the desire by some to forget the witch trials was probably to blame.

"What a wonderful thing it is for us to finally have the city recognize this spot," he said.

There is a memorial in downtown Salem to 20 victims.

Tom Brophy, 72, lives in front of Proctor's Ledge. He said he gave directions decades ago to Gallows Hill to a driver chauffeuring John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

"The old timers that used to be here when I was a little kid used to talk about the witchcraft and [that] this was the probable site," he said.

Kenneth Glover, who runs a tour in Salem, visited the site Tuesday. Now, he said, he can definitively tell visitors where the hangings occurred.

"When people come here from other places . . . they all want to know where it happened," he said.

Laura Crimaldi can be reached at laura.crimaldi@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @lauracrimaldi.

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Researchers pinpoint site of Salem witch hangings - The Boston Globe

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Still, Driscoll said: "This is part of our history, and this is an opportunity for us to be honest about what took place." The quest to confirm the precise spot of the hangings started in 2010, though it was not the first time historians examined the question, said Emerson "Tad" Baker, a Salem State University professor who helped pinpoint the location.

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The supports added in for crumbling graves

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Lightning pattern coming down to the tree.
Reference for lightning in illustration

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Photographs I took myself and some extra sourced photos if the burying point and Salem