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When I moved to Madison from rural Kentucky in 2021, I was familiar with black walnut trees and their bumptious tree habits, because they grew readily on the farm I had left behind.
Walnuts are not intentionally planted on streets of Madison; and yet, they are here. On plant timescales and in plant methods they reproduce themselves across the (urban) land, in collaboration with squirrels, spreading into unobserved corners and fencerows.
My work began to ask what might be learned from attention to these self-sown walnuts. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s call to fulfill our obligations to care for the more-than-human beings in our lives and Suzanne Simard’s writings about progenitor trees sending nutrients to their offspring trees prompted me to consider tree kin-collectives in urban contexts.
Beginning with one isolated old black walnut in the parking lot behind the Nitty Gritty restaurant on North
Frances street, I began to explore how these members of the urban ecology spread, reproduce, and maintain themselves—outside and beside the attention and intention of human planners—and to question what it means that the land carries on a life of its own, alongside the architecture and planned landscapes of human intention.
I walked the city blocks searching for other walnut trees. I wondered if there were walnuts of a similar age that had grown together in a nursery and been planted out, and I wondered if the young walnut trees growing next to the train tracks and in the little woods on the corner of Park and Johnson were the offspring trees of the older walnuts that grow very near them. I wanted to find definitive evidence, something beyond my speculation about trees’ proximity and relative sizes, of which trees were closely related to others. I wanted to find the family of the lonely walnut behind the Nitty Gritty.
In early 2022 I approached Dr. Jake Brunkard in Plant Genetics
to
ask if he and his lab would be willing to assist me with genetic testing as
part of a project that I envisioned for black walnut trees growing in Madison.
That first conversation with Dr. Brunkard developed into work that progressed
in depth and scope to become the foundation of my proposal for research at the
UW Arboretum in 2024/2025. Dr. Brunkard, and graduate student Rory Greenhalgh have been collaborating with me on this walnut work ever since. In this project, I collect green leaves and record the tree’s latitude and longitude coordinates. I deliver the leaves to the lab, where Rory and Dr. Brunkard run a PCR analysis on the leaves, and compare the genes of each tree with the others to determine how closely related they are.