Draw Me a Tree

Photographs by Dan Shepherd


YOU KNOW THE ONE: that tree you first climbed and got stuck in as a kid, the one that you see every morning as you drink your coffee, the one whose leaves always fill your gutters, or even the favorite sought out by your dog on evening walks. Not just any tree. For this project, I ask people to tell me about a tree that holds some importance to them. These really end up being stories about the people, stories of loss and love and a lot in between. After I hear someone’s story, we work out a time to visit the tree together, and I give them a little pad of paper and ask them to draw the tree. Everyone says they can’t draw, but they do. While they are drawing, they share more of their tree story, and I tell them about their tree’s natural history. When they’re finished, I set up the camera and shoot a double exposure, one with their hands holding their drawing kind of lined up with the outline of the tree, and then a second exposure without the drawing. The whole thing usually takes about twenty-five minutes. I started the project with two dozen tree stories from residents of Los Angeles and plan to expand it to other cities across America.

Dan Shepherd is a fine art photographer based in Los Angeles. He has worked at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and Patagonia’s Freedom to Roam coalition to protect wildlife corridors.

Comments

  1. Hello Orion Readers,

    I would love to hear about a tree that has some special importance to you or someone you know. Feel free to share your tree story here.

    Best,

    Dan

  2. We have a lovely pink dogwood that overhangs our backyard deck. When my daughter was 3, we were sitting outside underneath the branches of this tree when she looked up and asked me “Mommy what is this tree’s name?” I told her that it was a dogwood, but that’s not what she meant. “No, what is it’s name!” When I told her “I don’t know” She said, “She’s so pretty. I’m going to call her Cindy!” Ever since then, our family has referred to this tree as “Cindy”. As in- “Oh, look there’s a little, yellow bird sitting on Cindy!” or “Let’s take our lunch outside and sit under Cindy!” My daughter is married now and expecting her own little girl in March and I can’t wait to sit under Cindy’s pretty pink petals with her.

  3. What a great and worthwhile project, Dan. Thank you.

    There are two snags on the ranch in Wyoming where my son and daughter were raised. These big old ponderosas had grown side by side for at least 75 years, and I called them the Grandparent trees. After one brutal day of howling winds, the Grandmother tree was blown over.

    Now she lies beneath the Grandfather tree, stretched out, her trunk a sheltered area for ground dwelling animals, where once it sheltered the winged ones.

    If you’ve not heard the song “Two Trees” by Chuck Pyle, you might enjoy it. Here’s a link: http://www.chuckpyle.com/music.html.

    Thanks again.

    Page Lambert

  4. This is a beautiful project.

    I love the giant old red oak here that the swing hung on when I was a boy. I miss the old June apple tree in the pasture that climbed every spring for the first apples of the year. And the dogwood my Mama planted in the cemetary when my Daddy died is special to me as well.

    For a great poetic ode to a tree, check out Wendell Berry’s poem Sycamore.

    peace

  5. The oak tree of my childhood heaved its long, sinewy branches over the edge of the quarry making for perfect shade to rest under after an afternoon of riding our bikes; its hearty branches the perfect for attaching rope swings and climbing. It was a spot of many youthful injuries, and certainly young romances as well, yet this sliver of accidental wilderness would capture the occasional sounds of a coyote as its howl echoed off the quarry walls. Higher up in the tree, above our grasp, most certainly hawks would watch us scramble and climb on the slopes below. It’s impression in my mind 30 years later is so incredibly vivid and it is this impression that will have to suffice as the oak tree that stood sentinel over a generation of kids was replaced with young sweetgums planted squarely in the front yards of the new homes occupying the same footprint.

  6. On Hornby Island, overlooking Sand Dollar beach is the most beautiful Arbutus tree. It catches the setting sun and the red/orange bark glows like fire. Never situated more than 300 metres from the Pacific Ocean, Arbutus trees are said to be the spirit of a First Nations woman mourning the loss of her never-returned fisherman husband. They are the only evergreen trees that drip leaves year round. I have countless memories centred around Arbutus trees and this one in particular stands as my favourite.

  7. My Tree
    My tree is a friend. It’s a Cottonwood draped over a dry dusty arroyo in the middle of town.
    I cried when the winds of 2011 tore it practically in two.
    The city came and gave it some love and care. Now it is surviving a drought stricken winter that blows its branches and tetones around on the bike path.
    I love that tree, I long to see it in the morning with the pink and blue skies that are its backdrop. Every season is unique with the cycles of life that paint for us the changes we enjoy.
    The misty greens that suddenly appear in late Spring. The massive shadow it shares with me in the heat of the summer. The brillant gold and browns that cover the dark blue sky in fall. Now we wait with lace covered branches for the winter to end.
    My tree is my friend.

  8. I have trouble identifying just one tree that stands out from the forest of many I’ve paid special attention to throughout my life. Thinking of them makes me feel romantic, this attachment to nature, the way it makes you feel part of a bigger scheme of things. And the idea of nature offering an avenue for escape.

    In the end, I’d go for a wild cherry tree I climbed as a teenager in late summer some time back. I was attending a wedding party but it felt so overwhelming and out of touch with my current problems that I needed a place to run away.

    And I did it, undeterred by the oddity of my behavior, unsuitability of my outfit or what people would have thought.

    It was a couple of minutes of freedom that keep coming back and taste so great even twenty years on.

  10. Dan, this is a great project, especially in the way that it brings out suppressed artistic talent in those who don’t identify as “artists.”

    We consider the tree the symbol of life, maybe because of its obvious fractal pattern; in feng shui it is the energy of the morning and of creativity. I tried to include those elements in this pencil drawing of a cottonwood shading a Ute tipi and a mother bear and cub along the Uncompahgre River in western Colorado. It was an attempt to say something about place attachment, but also mobility in an environment of steep environmental gradients and uneven distribution of resources.
    http://www.shininghorizons.com/2010/09/ute-bears.html

    keep up the great work!

    Cheers,

    Matt Barnes

  12. my trees were the ones my brother and I swung from…the apple trees on a working sheep farm in Rhode Island. The one tree I especially remember is the tree I ran right into at top speed, I have the scar across my right eyebrow. Like many, I love the gigantic and very old Arbutus trees we have on Salt Spring Island, BC..one has a swing on it…

  13. The Great Beach Tree of Masters Drive

    It was an island of creative imagination in the heart of suburbia.

    It was a quiet tower of self determination when the world didn’t seem to listen.

    It was a castle, a rocket, a fortress.

    Smooth bark grounded in thick roots towering over neighborhood traffic, yet never seen.

    Forever residing in the soul of those who ventured up its outstretched branches.

  14. Trees are so amazingly comforting to me. Thank you for this beautiful sharing of stories.

    My own special tree came to me when I was a little girl. I lived a block away from my cousin, Diane. I loved going to her house to play. AND most of all, I loved the little tree that was on the corner of her block, hanging over the street.

    I can remember desperately wanting to climb the tree, but for what seemed like forever, I was too short to reach the branches. I would jump and jump, but could not reach it. Then, one day, I grew enough to jump and grab the lowest branch. After much practice, I was finally able to grab the branch with the hands of a 5 yr old and swing my legs up and over the branch. I was in heaven.

    I was able to finally sit on that branch, with my feet hanging down. I mastered this before my cousin could. Up I would go, to the highest branch I felt safe to climb.

    Freedom! I felt like a bird in the tree high above it all and far away from my mother’s craziness, safe, and happy.

    It is one of my happiest memories of my childhood and before we moved away when I was 9 yrs old. It comforts me now.

    It was only just before my mother died in talking about playing with my cousin Diane that I mentioned the tree. My mother was shocked. She had never known of my adventures in that tree or even that I could climb trees.

    It was my secret until then.

    Thank you for calling that out of me this afternoon.

  15. Thank you for triggering two tree memories both on the street that I grew up on. I now live on the island of Oahu and will not be able to be in the presence of the trees but my memories of the Oak tree and of the Willow tree will always be with me.

    Mahalo nui loa

  16. What a great project, Dan!

    When I was growing up in Clark Township, NJ, there were three beautiful old willows in my yard. And there were wild willows as well in the woods next to my house. I loved the ones in my yard. Summers, I climbed high up into them with a book, wove rooms with their hanging strands, used broken branches for beautifully bendable bows when I played Indian.

    Twice when a hurricane blew inland, the willows went down, and my father wrapped chains around their trunks and hauled them back up with our old Buick. I was so grateful that he’d saved my “friends.”

    Now I notice how the willows are among the first trees in the spring to gold and green up, and I wrote the following poem (from my book *Turtle Blessing*) about that:

    Willow

    The green window of the willow
    deep in the woods,
    shining from among the still bare
    trees
    opens into the first sunlight
    so pure its branches singe the air,
    so bright that I remember living
    there.

    (copyright (c) 1996 Penny Harter)

  17. A marvelous project! // My environmental concerns created a love/hate conflict over a tree that was the wrong tree for its location. For years I had wanted solar panels, and last year everything fell into place: I’d selected a house several years before with a perfect south-facing roof, and–finally–two local cities put together the financial incentives with lender, local solar manufacturer, government programs, and installer-contractor to make it possible. Hurray! But it was all dependent on taking down the maple in the front yard, a small tree when I’d bought the house and beautiful, especially in fall. Photo at: http://chelonianconnection.blogspot.com/2011/06/unwritten-language-unnamed-places.html // Now it was on its way to monumental size, and even the present level of shading would make the solar project impossible. In this case, though, other factors helped my decision: It was a Norway maple, now on local nuisance lists (masses of samaras, seemingly with one hundred percent germination–everywhere; a tendency to split half and half, visible in my tree, too; and a prodigious leaf drop, even too much for me to compost). The tree had to go. I miss it, but I am now a producer as well as user of electricity. (Yes, solar is sensible even in western Oregon, with its U.S.-average sunshine; summers, believe it or not, are mostly sunny.)

  18. WOW! Thank you to everyone for sharing your great stories, poems, recollections, drawings, and photos of trees that you have connected with in so many special ways.

    In trees we trust,

    Dan

  19. This is a poem I wrote about my favorite childhood tree entitled “Best Friends”:

    The stump has the same location I see
    Where there used to be a wild cherry tree.
    It’s bark was rough but would do me no harm
    Starting the climb,reaching up for her arm.

    And so pulling up forward,face to face,
    I’d find myself in an awkward embrace
    With the tree; but just temporarily,

    Since turning upright by ninety degrees
    Would prop me up in her theatre of leaves:
    Greenest in summer and golem in fall,
    Barest in winter with no leaves at all.

    In spring, it would bring a white hurricane
    Of cherry blossoms the tree chose to rain
    Like confetti as I swung on the tire
    Tied to her arm and paused to admire

    This shower of friendship she offered me.
    The swing is now gone and so is the tree,
    Yet still she provides a place to retire,
    A stump to rest upon and aspire

    To daydream is seasons she shared with me. Who says you can’t be best friends with a tree?

  20. The Live Oaks in New Orleans are some of the most distinguished trees I have ever seen.

  21. This project reminds me of a tree project my two sons did when homeschooling. The project lasted the full year, bringing in math, science, language arts, art, etc. They each chose a tree on our property, and studied it and observed it closely throughout the changing seasons, through measuring, tree mapping, and making other scientific observations, drawing and watercoloring and capturing its image in many different mediums, writing poetry, telling its stories, and studying other people’s writing about trees, and finally, learning about photosynthesis, adaptations, the tree’s role in the water cycle, functions of its parts, etc. It was a fantastic project that incorporated a lot of creative, experiential learning with direct contact with what we were studying. They each put together beautiful tree books that housed their own graphics, diagrams and drawings of the different cycles, tree functions, and trees themselves during the different seasons, as well as their poems, stories, etc. The books were each folded in a unique way, and they each came up with their own methods for how to best capture/illustrate what they had learned. It was such a special project–and the boys, now teenagers and back in school, still pay extra attention to their respective trees, and refer back to that project in their current crop of science courses.

  22. When I moved to southern Arizona about eight and a half years ago I ended up buying a new house on a bulldozed plot on a ridge near Nogales. That spring I decided to let the native grasses and flowering plants grow and set about pulling up tumbleweed, pigweed, ragweed and other weeds. I had my hand on what I thought was a weed when i noticed I hadn’t seen anything else like it, so took my hand off it and decided to watch what it would become. By later that summer I identified it as a Mexican Paloverde. There were none in the area around me, so I figured it must have been seeded by a bird or animal. In eight years it has grown into a sizable tree and when the wind blows strong enough it sounds like the pine trees my mother used to set me under as a child in the Sierra Nevada foothills. I love this tree as it often sings to me and reminds me of home.

  23. I can recommend a wonderful book for all tree lovers – Nature and Renewal by Dean Bennett. Get it from Amazon, or local bookstore. The best tree story ever!!!

  24. My tree is a plum tree almost leaning up against my house. My landlord hacks away at it, trying to keep branches away from the rain gutters so leaves don’t stuff them up when the tree sheds in the Fall. The tree has a really odd shape and sometimes I think he has killed it, but then miraculously it comes back! We had practically no rain in Berkeley this year and so I can’t really call the season we are in “winter,” but the tree is blooming profusely now and tiny green leaves are coming in. It’s beautiful! A strong wind sends a snowfall of white petals across the driveway and I imagine that we actually do have a winter in an odd way. In the summer, my tree gives us plums. There is always someone picking up some really soft ones that have fallen on the ground or trying to reach up to grab a few from an ill-pruned branch. It’s twisted limbs are not giving up too easily. Today, I wondered how long the tree will last if we continue to have no rain…

  25. My tree is a cherry blossom. It stands at the end of a road on a small island of grass surrounded by pavements. This is the road I grew up on and the cherry blossom is the tree I played in. The children would climb it, fight over it, and claim it, and the grass around the tree has almost been worn to mud by their feet.

    I still remember how to climb it. The first foothold, a bulge in the trees trunk. Then the first branch, which I had to grab with my hands and swing my legs up on to. From there I could step up into the palm of the tree, a perfect little seat to sit in and guard the fort. Too slow and you have to perch awkwardly on one of the surrounding branches.

    Cherry blossoms are loved for their display of pink petals that snow in a spring breeze, but I don’t really remember the blossom. I remember the tree more for the deep maroon of its leaves in the autumn. Spring already has its distractions, but the maroon leaves are enough to enliven a rainy, grey day. Thinking about it, I can almost hear the sucking sound of tyres on wet tarmac.

  26. In the old city neighborhood where I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, there was a huge, bountiful gingko tree that we turned into a playhouse. It sat at the edge of a city park, not too far from the Sherry Netherland Hotel, close to Lake Shore Drive on the lake.

    Its foot-wide thick rounded branches were big enough and wide enough to hold twenty kids, although there were perhaps only five or six of us at a time hanging out in this tree. The gingko was so gnarly and wide that it must have been a hundred years old or more.

    Sometimes we’d bring our homework up there and do it in this big tree. We’d simply give each other ‘leg-ups’ and pass up notebooks and pencils.

    My mother would send our little brothers and sisters with us after school, and, having climbed up to the higher branches of the tree, we had a good vantage point to keep an eye on the little ones.

    It’s been so long since I was there that I don’t know if the tree has survived the decades since I last hoisted myself up, with siblings and friends.

    Attached in the url above is a story I wrote for Orion Magazine a decade ago in which I made passing mention of this tree. I’m so glad to have a chance to write more about it!

  27. In the old city neighborhood where I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, there was a huge, bountiful gingko tree that we turned into a playhouse. It sat at the edge of a city park, not too far from the Sherry Netherland Hotel, close to Lake Shore Drive on the lake.

    Its foot-wide, thick rounded branches were big enough and wide enough to hold twenty kids, although there were perhaps only five or six of us at a time hanging out in this tree. The gingko was so gnarly and wide that it must have been a hundred years old or more.

    Sometimes we’d bring our homework up there and do it in this big tree. We’d simply give each other a ‘leg-up’ and pass up notebooks and pencils.

    My mother would send our little brothers and sisters with us after school. Having climbed up to the higher branches of the tree, we had a good vantage point to keep an eye on the little ones.

    It’s been so long since I was there that I don’t know if the tree has survived the decades since I last hoisted myself up, with siblings and friends.

    Attached in the url above is a story I wrote for Orion Magazine a decade ago in which I made passing mention of this tree. I’m so glad to have a chance to write more about it!

  29. A marvelous project! // My environmental concerns created a love/hate conflict over a tree that was the wrong tree for its location. For years I had wanted solar panels, and last year everything fell into place: I’d selected a house several years before with a perfect south-facing roof, and—finally—two local cities put together the financial incentives with lender, local solar manufacturer, government programs, and installer-contractor to make it possible. Hurray! But it was all dependent on taking down the maple in the front yard, a small tree when I’d bought the house and beautiful, especially in fall. Photo at:

  30. Lovely sketch of a wonderful morning! Kids are naturally creative and their thoughts are innovative and sharp so it’s easy to make a sketch of a tree though they refused for it earlier (I think it’s for fear or shy ;)!). Thanks for a pleasant experience.

  31. Great article – Thanks for sharing. Enjoyed reading your views – Might just refer a couple of lady’s from the office to view the article.

  32. A marvelous project! // My environmental concerns created a love/hate conflict over a tree that was the wrong tree for its location. For years I had wanted solar panels, and last year everything fell into place: I’d selected a house several years before with a perfect south-facing roof, and—finally—two local cities put together the financial incentives with lender, local solar manufacturer, government programs, and installer-contractor to make it possible. Hurray! But it was all dependent on taking down the maple in the front yard, a small tree when I’d bought the house and beautiful, especially in fall.

  33. That amazing tree in our front yard when I was a child, tall, strong and always tied with a strong rope to her branches. A true warrior tree for putting up with everything we threw at her.

  34. It was a fantastic project that incorporated a lot of creative, experiential learning with direct contact with what we were studying. They each put together beautiful tree books that housed their own graphics, diagrams and drawings of the different cycles, tree functions, and trees themselves during the different seasons, as well as their poems

  36. I was born in east Lansing, Michigan. i lived there until i was eight, there was this park that my family used to go to. My favorite place was a big lawn surrounded by these big pines where my family and I would play football. i really like the drawing “a nice place for henry to play” because it reminds me of my childhood home

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