REVIEWED BY SARAH COWLES

FROM THE MARCH 2019 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

Street trees occupy a shifting and contested dimension of cities. Whereas trees in parks and private gardens in cities are afforded a measure of stability and protection, street trees are literally on the front lines of urbanism, absorbing the impacts of changes in policy on errant cars. Street trees are surrounded: hemmed in by architecture, tree grates, cages, with leaking gas conduits at their roots and power lines teasing their crowns, soaked by deicing salt on one side and dog urine on the other.

Although there are field guides to street trees and technical manuals for planting and soil specifications, there is no comprehensive look at the culture and politics of the urban forest. Seeing Trees by Sonja Dümpelmann fills this void and unearths a detailed and complex vein of urban history that “offers insights into how our relationships with both nature and the city have changed over time.” The collection of illustrated essays, divided into sections on New York and Berlin, is “about street trees’ literal and figurative entanglement not only in the built urban structure but also in the urban social, cultural, and political life as a whole.”

Dümpelmann takes on an elusive spatial subject in landscape architecture history. Unlike a particular landscape “unit” such as a park, garden, or river corridor, street trees are individual constituents of larger urban and regional masses of tree cover. The book covers the history of the single tree in the urban right-of-way, and the emergence of research on the distributed “hyperobject” of the urban forest. Like an individual seeking a voice in a community, representation is key to advocacy. An individual street tree can be seen and counted, but for the urban forest as a whole to be valued, it must be represented in the abstract. Dümpelmann documents many ways that arborists and citizen advocates in both communist and capitalist regimes have attempted to plant, maintain, represent, and catalog the urban forest, but unfortunately shies from offering critique and analysis, drawn from her exceptional research, that might lead to more productive and equitable models to support and maintain the urban forest. As a whole, the weakness of the volume is structural; it leaves much low-hanging fruit out for subsequent analysis, and at times this reader longed for a chapter or at least for a handful of position paragraphs—beyond the brackets of the introduction and conclusion—that distill this deep dive into the archives into guidance for the future.

A 1963 greening plan for the center of East Berlin. Image courtesy Landesarchiv Berlin, C REP. 110-04 [KARTEN], NR. 112 T 1 and 2.

Dümpelmann, an associate professor of landscape architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, leads with “Tree Doctor vs. Tree Butcher,” a chapter introducing the congested streets of late 19th century New York, strung with new overhead telegraph wires and lined with gas conduits below. This period ushers in the birth and development of arboriculture, a term that “by the early twentieth century had come to be used in English to describe the planting and maintenance of street trees, encapsulates this fusion of nature and culture by means of science and technology.” It is an era of innovations in street tree artifice and technology, such as protective tree guards and grates. Tree guards, derived from structures to protect pasture trees from hungry livestock, give “expression on a micro scale to the larger rural–urban transformations that were occurring at the time.”

The chapter also details the emergence of specialized research on urban forests, including the first studies on how street trees moderate urban temperatures and have a positive effect on public health. Dümpelmann documents the rise of a new professional discipline of urban forestry, whose practitioners were in “forestry, landscape architecture, horticulture, or plant science.” These experts were charged with selecting and evaluating species with the best aesthetic and adaptation traits for harsh urban conditions. A highlight of the chapter is the detailed research on the polarizing tree of heaven.

In “Street Tree Aesthetics,” Dümpelmann discusses the debates, proposals, and technologies involved in creating an orderly yet diverse urban forest in New York City. Before terms like biodiversity and resilience, urban forestry specialists sought species that were pest resistant and varied visually, though similar in form and habit. By 1940, the city was lined with a municipal palette familiar to most New Yorkers: linden, ginkgo, Norway maple, and Oriental plane trees.

Urban trees were vulnerable to insect infestations resulting in defoliation and other nuisances. Early methods of pesticide application were coarse, and Dümpelmann’s research exposes the lax protections afforded citizens and workers who worked with pesticides.

Suggested crown shapes and crown-trunk ratios based on age, from a 19th century treatise. Image courtesy A. Des Cars, A Treatise on Pruning Forest and Ornamental Trees, Trans. from the 7th French Ed., 3rd Ed. [Boston: Massachusetts Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, 1894].

As the nation became industrialized, practitioners developed methods to standardize the planting and ongoing care of street trees. Dümpelmann beautifully illustrates these early efforts with archival images of dendroscopes, a French invention introduced at the 1867 World’s Fair. A dendroscope is a template of an ideal tree shape that one worker peers through to guide the worker pruning the tree. Initially used for optimal lumber production, the dendroscope was adapted to guide pruning of trees in their stages of growth. The dendroscope prefigures the modern impetus toward crown symmetry, reinforced through selection and hybridization of today’s popular species, such as Green Vase zelkova and pin oak. The chapter includes descriptions of early time and motion studies of proper limb pruning techniques, contrasted with images of optimal bricklaying, reinforcing the drive toward the Taylorization of human labor. She rounds out the chapter on the aesthetic realm of urban forestry with descriptions of the new uniforms for tree workers, created to promote a professional image on the street and in worker parades, and designed for mobility and durability. Innovations in technology continue to condition the relationships of citizens to their trees and the public officials administering their care, resulting in programs such as TreesCount!, the 2015–2016 street tree census that fed citizen-gathered data to an open-source map of New York’s trees.

In the third chapter on New York, Dümpelmann posits that in the late 19th century, women trained their attention on street trees because the realm in front of their homes was one of the few public spaces for women to inhabit. She provides a rundown of their organizations and campaigns for a greener city and advocacy for restoring faltering bird populations. Birds still provided the best, least costly defense against insect infestations of the urban forests, but were affected by predation loss of habitat. Dümpelmann outlines how birds became a focal point of organization for elite women, delving into the intricacies of urban birdhouse design, the demands of the international millinery trade’s appetite for birds and their decorative feathers, and the design of an early bird sanctuary in New Hampshire. Though they may appear to be digressions from the book’s subject, these examples reflect the diverse ways women lobbied from the periphery for healthy urban forests.

“Isles of safety” and trees in movable boxes in a 1911 plan for New York City’s Fifth Avenue. Image courtesy Tree Planting Association of New York City, Reports of Officers, Charter, By-Laws, Committees, 1912 [New York: Tree Planting Association, 1912]. General Research Division, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

In the chapter “Planting Civil Rights” (previously published in LAM in December 2015), Dümpelmann covers urban greening efforts in the civil rights era, focusing on the work of Hattie Carthan, a community leader in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Carthan organized planting campaigns to improve environmental conditions and increase community coherence and stewardship in lower-income neighborhoods.

Dümpelmann writes that “tree planting was a creative and constructive activity that could—its supporters certainly hoped—replace the neighborhood’s more common hostility and alienation.” What is troubling is that Dümpelmann’s chapter does not address reasons for this alleged “common hostility and alienation.” She omits speculation on the root causes of social fragmentation in the targeted neighborhoods—for example, the specific economic precarity, structural racism, and poverty of the time. Her examples outline how tree planting programs were considered vehicles for urban social reform, but she avoids examining the other side, where poorer urban citizens were expected to provide under- or uncompensated labor and materials to reconcile the structural inequities in their immediate environment.

The section on the history of New York’s street trees demonstrates that street trees’ dual nature as a singular, local element and as a constituent of the urban forest has long been a source of trouble for advocates and urban leaders. The chapters demonstrate that effective advocacy is often localized, down to the neighborhood or block, where class and race are stratified, while investments in the body of the urban forest as a whole can benefit all citizens. Yet Dümpelmann shrinks from dispatching her research to draw out the class conflicts and assumptions evident in the approaches to greening in wealthy versus poor neighborhoods.

Today, publicly accessible urban forest maps like the New York City Street Tree Map are a means to visualize and ameliorate these inequalities in forest cover. The map provides a picture of spatial distribution of the urban forest that can be correlated with demographic data.

“Burning Trees,” the first chapter in the section on Berlin, stands out for its poignant picture of a city ruined by aerial bombardment and postwar precarity. In this chapter, Dümpelmann outlines trees’ ability to support the survival of devastated communities and mitigate whatever chaos humankind generates. The chapter includes a discussion of “weaponized” street trees, packed with explosives and partially cut, to be detonated and fall in the path of tanks, and efforts by scientists to inventory the number of fruit-bearing species, such as mountain ash and sea buckthorn, that could provide vitamin A to meet the nutrition needs of malnourished survivors. During the blockade of West Berlin between 1948 and 1949, the city was cut off from energy supply lines, causing more culling of the urban forest for heating and cooking.

Hajo Schüler’s posters advocated for street trees in the 1980s. Image courtesy Studienarchiv Umweltgeschichte, Neubrandenburg.

Dümpelmann’s investigation retrieved detailed information on early research and design of Trümmerbegrünung (rubble greening on sites destroyed by bombs) and the building of topsoil through communal composting efforts, which dovetails neatly with Jens Lachmund’s Greening Berlin (The MIT Press, 2013), a history of citizen ecologists and park advocacy movements in Berlin from the postwar period to the present day.

“Greening Trees” details the advances in technology and research in the postwar period to the 1970s and contrasts the approaches between the governments of East and West Berlin. In the east, designers such as Walter Meissner and Walter Funcke envisioned new planting schemes for the mass production of worker housing, although many schemes were never planted owing to a lack of nursery supply. West Berlin reforestation efforts focused on planting trees on the front lawns of private properties.

New avenues of research during this era included measuring how trees attenuate noise from cars and aircraft in the urban sound sphere, new tree nursery transplantation methods and stump removal devices, and the emergence of environmental psychology, another branch of science focused on the value of the positive impacts of urban greenery. The divided city, with its contrasting aims and justifications for urban greening, engendered a diversity of research and site-based experimentation that would enrich the city post-reunification.

A 1948 plan for the Insulaner, a park to be created on postwar rubble. Image courtesy Landesarchiv Berlin, Insulaner, F REP. 270 A, 4748.

Dümpelmann knits together the emerging ecological art movement and activism of the postwar period in “Shades of Red.” Starting in the mid-1970s, the Berlin-based artist Ben Wargin planted hundreds of ginkgo trees and site-based agitprop installations on car roofs and barges, installed the Parliament of Trees, a garden memorial to those who died attempting to cross the Berlin Wall, and likely influenced Joseph Beuys’s 7,000 Oaks—City Forestation Instead of City Administration, a work first presented at Documenta 7 in 1982 in Kassel, Germany.

In East Berlin, “oppositional street tree activism provided cover to evade state control and surveillance and created space for other adversarial activities. Given their relative ‘neutrality,’ street tree-planting campaigns were tolerated more easily by the state, although it followed these campaigns closely.” Groups such as the Association for the Protection of Berlin Trees organized protests against road widening projects that removed street trees, the destruction of cobble paving, and poor or underfunded arboriculture.

East Berlin struggled with the same financial woes as the West, but without a private sector to make up the difference. To maintain and improve the public realm, citizens were expected to contribute weekend hours in a program called “Participate!” where labor was not entirely altruistic—“participation could earn them certain favors such as a promotion, the ability to travel abroad, or a bigger apartment,” and by 1982, East Berlin’s tree ordinance “finally codified street tree care as citizen labor.”

Notable post-reunification efforts to green the city included citizen-led tree planting efforts where the wall once stood. “Tree planting was a displacement activity, an activity that sought to heal the fissures of the German psyche as well as the physical fissures in the urban fabric, an activity that expressed the desire to make Berlin whole again and to overcome the different cultural traditions, frameworks, and collective memories in East and West Germany.” The discussion also includes the metamorphosis of Berlin’s famous Unter den Linden boulevard as an urban datum reflecting political changes, from imperial times, the poisoning and loss of trees owing to the introduction of illuminating gas, and its widening as a Nazi parade ground and subsequent rehabilitation under reunification.

Seeing Trees offers a new perspective on the history of two cities’ growth. It’s a historical resource for practitioners and planners working in temperate, continental cities who are looking for ways to represent the urban forest and its benefits. It is illustrated with exceptional images and examples of early information design in landscape representation techniques. It is also a book about the messy work and negotiations of landscape urbanism, though it is thankfully devoid of stilted academic language or jargon. It reads as a delightful work of nonfiction, though at times the narrative loses momentum in the minutiae of the characters and quantities. But as a scholarly foundation, it creates a new dimension of study for others to take on this rich topic.

Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York City and Berlin, by Sonja Dümpelmann; New Haven, Connecticut, and London: Yale University Press, 2019; 332 pages, $50.

Sarah Cowles is a cofounder of Isthmus Group, a landscape design and planning studio based in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia.