Memorial Trees and Treescape Memories

Abstract

The interconnections between trees and memorialisation are explored at three particular sites in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand. Memorial trees have been used as a seemingly blank canvas, to be coloured by the paintbox of memory. The ability of such trees to carry significant memories of past events into the present involves myriad slippages and all kinds of untidiness: the settings in which memorial trees are asked to perform are subject to significant and often transformative cultural change; the trees themselves are active organic components in the changing coconstitution of place and place meanings; and tree places can afford emotional responses and serve as spaces of much more immediate and prereflexive practice and performance. These dynamics suggest rather different connections between trees and memorialisation, which we term treescape memories.