The Urban Tree Oracle
A multi-sensory collective tool for climate resilience,
which invites an embodied communing with our more-than-human kin, urban trees.
Join the Urban Tree Oracle
The Urban Tree Oracle is free and open to all.
Each month we get to know an urban tree through in person gatherings in the greater Boston area, as well as US mail works, a newsletter, and solo experiences. We are working in partnership with local community organizations and institutions, which you can find out about on each tree page.
I invite you to take part in a number of ways:
Be part of a gathering with an urban tree in the Greater Boston area in 2024-25
Receive a monthly newsletter with images, musings, and scores about urban trees
sign up here
Host a tree gathering on your sidewalk, plaza, courtyard, yard, urban wild, lead by Jane D. Marsching, email me for more information
Events coming up:
December Gathering with Hemlock
on the Winter Solstice 12/21/24 5:30-7:30pm
Around a solstice fire and at my studio in Hyde Park
register
January 2025 Gathering with Willow
Via the US Postal Service
Registration will open in December
March 2025 Gathering with Tree of Heaven
At Cloth Collaborative, Hyde Park, MA
April 2025 Gathering with Sycamore
Wednesday 4/23 1:15-2:45pm
At MassArt
Summer 2025 Gathering with Hickory
Governors Island, NYC
Fall 2025 Gathering with Black Locust
At Blackstone Valley Corridor with the College of Holy Cross
Black Cherry
Linden
Hemlock
Crab Apple
Willow
Sycamore
Elm
black locust
birch
ailanthus
hickory
Bee Bee
pine
beech
black walnut
black tupelo
barberry
oak
hackberry
maple
sumac
northern catalpa
horse chestnut
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A child of ancient divination tools that look to the natural world for clues, the Urban Tree Oracle fosters an animistic awareness and insight into the countless threads that bind all beings together in relationship.
The Urban Tree Oracle is a collective tool for climate resilience through a series of scores, embodiment exercises, handmade tree ink, and drawing prompts that introduce us to our more-than-human kin, urban trees. Our urban tree canopy has an essential role in climate adaptation The 26 trees include ones that are considered “invasive” or “weed” trees, others that were planted intentionally and some that have seeded themselves.
One aspect of each tree’s role in our ecosystem is highlighted and translated to participants through a poetic score, which is experienced in embodied sensory experimental practices. The tree speaks through the Urban Tree Oracle by way of their tannins, pigments, and material self, which are processed into inks used to create oracle cards through a monoprinting and drawing process.
