the research/

This work addresses a local question that has global applicability: what if there is no material division between “nature space” and “culture space,” and the obligation to care for and about living systems reaches beyond the borders of those categories and into all environments of our daily lives?


While the question is broadly applicable, the specificities of this particular project help scaffold thinking through what borders and boundaries between nature/culture mean materially. 

This project focuses on the space on either side of the boundary line around the UW Madison Arboretum –the conservation park on one side and other forms of built landscape including houses, industry, freeway, golf course on the other –and looks for kin-collective of black walnut trees that traverse and tresspass the imagined line. 

I am an Arboretum Research Fellow, and in that role I have a permit to collect walnut leaves inside the boundaries of the Arboretum. 
  

My transect, or the path along which I travel and record my encounters with walnut trees, crisscrosses roads, trails & neighborhoods. 

I am looking for very old walnut trees, such as the tree at the west entrance to the Areboretum which is at least 171 years old, and for very young walnuts that might be their offspring, such as the small saplings growing in many front garden beds.

The oldest black walnuts growing where the Arboretum stands now precede the conservation park, and precede the division of the landscape into parcels that followed the arrival of settler-colonial surveyors. The oldest black walnuts in the surrounding neighborhoods likewise have stood rooted since before the streets were poured in. Their offspring trees crowd along marginal spaces such as fences, sidewalks, and the bike path.






I collect one leaf from each tree, mark the tree’s location using latitude and longitude, and measure its circumference so the tree’s age can be estimated.

I will collaborate with the Brunkard Plant Genetics lab at UW Madison to run genetic testing on the leaves, to determine which trees are very closely related-- perhaps even locating direct offspring trees-- and then using their age difference to interpret the movement across generations as migration.


The genetics lab only needs a small section of one leaf to run the genetic testing, and I process the leaves and freeze the samples.



Previous iterations of this work tested 14 fully grown trees growing near the Nitty Gritty restaurant in downtown Madison, looking for the immediate realtions of one very isolated tree.

 The trees were found to be no more closely related to each other than “cousin.” In the current project I focus on locating very young trees, anticipating that those have a high likelihood of being offspring of nearby established trees.