Trees as Part of Community 

Marta Janik | Warsaw, Poland 

Trees are living, breathing things as much a part of a community as the people who live there. At one time, Vermont’s villages were lined with giant elm trees. The New England Historical Society recalled the history, “In the mid-19th century, village improvement societies planted thousands of the stately, fast growing trees. In the summer, their leafy branches formed a cathedral-like canopy over village greens and city streets. But planting so many of one kind of tree created a monoculture that carried the seeds of its own destruction.” Shortly after World War I, Dutch elm disease ravaged these iconic trees; by the 1960s, they had largely been wiped out.14 Marta Janik was taken with images of trees she found perusing Stewart-Swift Research Center material found in the virtual collection of the University of Vermont’s Landscape Change Program. Her collage “is a tribute to the people of Vermont whose faces I have met in hundreds of photographs and to the trees that are part of this community. In the picture we can see a large elm. It was one of the most popular trees in the USA. Life goes on among the trees. We sit under them, mark the streets of cities with them, arrange dates under them, admire them, watch them grow.” She writes: “The stories of the people depicted are part of this tree. Therefore, it becomes a family tree, a witness of human generations, human lives, and people are part of nature. They breathe thanks to photosynthesis, which is the main activity of the tree. But trees can also be fragile - just like our lives. Sometimes there are disasters. Since the mid-twentieth century, Dutch elm disease has unfortunately killed millions of these trees around the world. The culprit is the elm beetle, carrying the fungus Ophistoma ulmi, which destroys this species of trees. But people are also responsible for spreading this disease. The lives of trees and people are related.” “How to deal with passing? How do we accept the fact that we are mortal after all? At the bottom of the tree, we see a beetle that is threatening the elm. But on top of it there are little girls holding the seed. The seed and the girls are hope. What will happen next?”