Maya Lin's Manhattan Ghost Forest

 

Ghost Forest. Installation by Maya Lin. Photo credit: from the Guardian.com

Courtesy the artist and Madison Square Park Conservancy/ Andy Romer

I have to share this installation from a colleague, so powerful and mindblower it looks. 

From the article on The Guardian:

"In Manhattan’s bustling Flatiron District, 49 coastal Atlantic cedars – each around 40ft tall, leafless branches grasping at the sky – tower over Madison Square Park’s usually flat, grassy plain. The spectral forest, a new installation by the artist and architect Maya Lin, looms like a jarring holdout from winter – barren, save for smattering of lichen on each trunk, a stark contrast to the verdant six-acre park’s late-spring growth and the clean lines of the skyscrapers overhead. 

 The urban forest recalls the island’s pre-city past as a dense woodland teeming with birdsong and animals larger than rats, and stands as a sort of slow-rolling funeral – the 49 trees, all about 80 years old, are still technically alive but will die completely within about two years, the victim of saltwater tree rot from rising sea levels in New Jersey’s coastal Pine Barrens region.

 Lin’s Ghost Forest, hosted in the park until 14 November, takes it name from the ecological phenomenon in which large swaths of woodland are killed off at once by rapid environmental degradation, be it invasive species or saltwater inundation as sea levels rise. Coastal cedars such as the 49 Lin calls her “gentle giants” used to abound on the eastern seaboard, but habitat loss and climate change have hemmed the species into now just a mere 50,000 acres."

Keep on reading:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/may/13/maya-lin-manhattan-madison-square-park

This picture from: Madison Square Park.org 

Bottle Palm Tree (Beaucarnea Recurvata)

 

This is a group of Bottle Palm trees (Beaucarnea Recurvata) from the Huntington Library and Gardens in San Marino, CA. I took this picture in July 2016, and I decided to filter it in black and white in order to appreciate their morphology.

I like these trees so much, small in plant pots or huge in a park. 

From Wikipedia:

Beaucarnea recurvata, the elephant's foot or ponytail palm, is a species of plant in the family Asparagaceae. The species was native to numerous states of eastern Mexico but is now confined to the state of Veracruz. Despite its common name, it is not closely related to the true palms (Arecaceae). It has become popular in Europe and worldwide as an ornamental plant. There are 350-year-old Beaucarneas registered in Mexico. 

It is an evergreen perennial growing to 15 feet 6 inches (4.72 m) with a noticeable expanded caudex, for storing water. The single palm-like stem produces terminal tufts of strap-shaped, recurved leathery leaves, sometimes hair lock-shaped in the ends, and with occasional panicles of small white flowers once the plant reaches over 10 years of age. The only moderately swollen trunk at the base is slender over it and only slightly branched. The almost spherical caudex in the youth stage later becomes 4 to 6 meters long and reaches a diameter of up to 50 centimeters and more at the base. The bark is smooth. The green lineal, slightly rejuvenated and bent leaves are thin, flat or slightly ridged. They are 90 to 180 inches long and 15 to 20 millimeters wide.

Keep on reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaucarnea_recurvata