Visit to "Religion of Trees" today by a photo-grapher colleague who's just produced a New York Street Tree Tarot deck. The deck (which our class explored on its own last week) was eight years in the making, we learned, bringing together his abiding passion for street trees with a first year studio at Parsons School of Design where he'd been helping students develop tarot decks of their own. "When are you going to make one," people kept asking... In the event, his beautifully produced deck (and manual) came out just as New York was swooning over the Tarot exhibition at the Morgan - serendipity!
But before we got into his tarot, he took us out to observe some street trees whose often very difficult lives are visible if you pay attention, and before that he spread out some leaves on the table of our antiseptic classroom. Picked up in the park by where he lives in the north Bronx were leaves of kanzan cherry, pin oak and maple (and a cottonwood stick which feels like a magic wand). Amazing how little it takes to bring nature into a space, he observed. Take one home, he urged.
