Kate Farrington’s Monument to the Trees of the Public Garden

When a Nor’easter storm in April of 2024 toppled a sixty-five-year-old willow tree in Boston’s Public Garden, it made headlines. The “iconic” tree was a fixture of the lagoon with long branches that dipped into the water. Parkgoers took to social media to share their sadness and photos of the tree while the stewards of the park, The Friends of the Public Garden, hosted an event to “say farewell to an old friend.” Later, member Maliaka Shepard even wrote the tree a eulogy.

The Boston Public Garden is a hub in the center of the city where tourists, students, and locals all make use of the manicured green space that is bursting with plant life. In a city as old as Boston, landmarks, like a willow tree or the ducklings sculptures, feel like constants. As we interact with the public space, whether it be picnicking under an elm tree or remembering a dying crab apple trunk, the space becomes activated. The trees become more than trees; they are monuments to the lives of those who interact with them in the center of the city.

Kate Farrington, a professor of environmental ethics at Emerson, believes we should interrogate the quality of the relationships between humans and the natural world. “There is a mutuality,” she insists, “about our connection to nature.” A writer and artist, her artistic practice began in portraiture and drawing with architectural references and evolved into working exclusively with art collectives creating what she refers to as “socially engaged art.” Past projects have included performance installations, pottery, and sumi ink drawings centered on themes such as friendship and futurism, all existing in the wider context of environmental activism.

When Farrington heard about the Un-monument initiative, she knew she wanted to create a collaborative piece focused on the Boston Common and the adjacent Public Garden that would serve as a living archive and celebration of the trees that have borne witness to and hold the histories of these sites.

As the oldest public park in the country, the Common is a hub for seeing Boston’s more distant history on display—it marks the beginning of the Freedom Trail where actors dressed in colonial garb lead tours around notable sites from the American Revolution. Structures and sculptures are primarily dedicated to military history: the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, the Boston Massacre Memorial, and the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial that honors African American soldiers who fought in the Civil War, to name a few. Of course, the Common is now home to the twenty-foot-tall by twenty-five-foot-wide Embrace—a large-scale depiction of a hug between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King—which honors the love between the civil rights activist and his spouse who met during his time in Boston. Across the way at the Arlington Street entrance to the Garden, a statue of George Washington, a slave owner, appears triumphant on a horse. As part of colonized land, the historic park is not without its own history of horror and bloodshed, as an oak tree in the Common was once the site for the execution of more than fifty Native Americans for their participation during what is known as King Philip’s, or the Great Narragansett, War. Taken together, a narrative about the history of the park and, in turn, the history of our county, begins to emerge.

Though the public could contribute to the project’s archive by submitting their own odes on the “Future Monument” website, the audio that made its way onto the first release primarily featured writing by friends of Farrington or her students. Many students are transplants from other parts of the country or world and have a more transient relationship with the city. The project missed an opportunity to work with local poets and writers, who are typically a more rooted demographic, who could have been reached with a well-advertised open call for submissions. Not only would this have opened the project to additional perspectives, but it also would have taken the collaboration outside of the world of academia and brought it back to the Boston art community.

Despite this, the perspectives were refreshing and thoughtful. Some contributors were drawn to their tree due to its origins, such as Nora Williams, who was initially hesitant when she chose the golden rain tree. “There did not seem to be a lot of information about it outside of a few botanical facts,” she said. But as she continued to research and observe the tree, a more personal meaning took root. “It made me think about being an adoptee from China and how the particularity of where I started will always be a part of who I am, while my identity also grows and changes in the environment that I am in [and] where I call home,” Williams explained. Her piece, “A Vignette of a Chinese Adoptee,” reflected this glorious belonging using the image of the golden rain tree as a lantern and described how it makes evenings in the Public Garden an ethereal event. She writes: “Here I’ll take a / branch of goldening leaves and hazel sunlit lanterns to / light a circle of belonging.”

Others took more inspiration from the shape of their tree. “I hadn’t written a poem since middle school,” student Zander Colman said. He was drawn to his tree, the little-leaf linden, by its shape: “Its unique form captivated me, extending over the water and its roots dramatically exposed to us.” Colman’s ode, “The Little Leaf Linden Tree,” is prefaced with some scientific background, mentioning the tree’s silhouette and its potential for a towering final height. He describes how the tree is “cradling the earth” and creates a “silent connection of where earth and sky meet.”

Last November, the project had a three-day launch event during which Farrington led a group of visitors on the same tour she had taken me on the month prior. With the signage, any park visitor could also scan the QR code by a given tree using the Hoverlay app. Her data shows that across three days the codes were scanned around fifty to one hundred times.

Despite taking place in a high-traffic area, the event was almost exclusively attended by friends and relatives of the ode writers, though a handful of people from the public joined each tour as they observed the group. Farrington said she had assistance with advertising the event from the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture, but news of the tours did not reach a wide audience or result in a large public attendance.

It is also of note that the project missed the opportunity to consider the history of the land and engage with the violence enacted by colonial settlers, which made it difficult to ascertain who the target audience was for the project. Viewing human interaction in the central city space in such an ahistorical way contributed to an erasure of the suffering of Indigenous peoples. Therefore, the “Future Monument” may not have had the same impact on members of marginalized groups with a more traumatizing historical relationship to the green space in the center of Boston. Farrington’s view of the past is almost a more industrial one.

“It is about the interrelationship between the built world of human society,” she explained, “and the ecological interconnectedness.” She also remarked that the act of making the project into an archive has only just begun.

Farrington had originally planned on expanding the project into the second year of the Un-monument program. She hoped to bring trees from other Boston neighborhoods into the Common using AR, complete with odes written by residents of the respective neighborhoods. Farrington also wanted to use the Hoverlay app in a tour at night when people can better see the overlay of images and videos on their phone cameras, and imagined the next stage would have an emphasis on public attendance by promoting the events to a larger extent. According to program administrators, however, Farrington’s proposal for additional funding was not selected in year two of the Un-monument initiative.

Ultimately, Farrington encourages her audience to look at the relationship between the trees of the Garden and humans interacting with them as symbiotic. Trees are monuments to human interaction, both positive and negative, because they are inherently interconnected to human activity. The “Future Monument to the Trees of the Public Garden” urged its audience to see the wildlife as a part of the city and themselves, but failed to acknowledge the blood the land once held.