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Today, one of the innumerable minor privileges of American whiteness is the freedom to appreciate trees as just trees: anodyne features, ahistorical objects. Viewing the same scenery, African Americans can hardly ignore a painful past. “Trees carry an intolerable weight,” states Glenis Redmond. Another poet, Lucille Clifton, begins, “surely i am able to write poems celebrating grass,” before finding it impossible to advance to woody flora. A predecessor, Gwendolyn Brooks, said in 1969: “In Chicago we have had spirited conversations about whether a black poet has the right to deal with trees, to concern himself with trees. And one of the things that I've always said was, certainly, certainly a black poet may be involved in a concern for trees, if only because when he looks at one he thinks of how his ancestors have been lynched thereon.”1

Not so long ago, white Americans popularized a beneficent mutualism of trees, history, and memory. From the Revolution until World War II, the literary landscape abounded with tree talk, even talking trees. Joyce Kilmer's 1913 poem “Trees” (“I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree”) marked the peak bloom (though not the aesthetic crown) of a canon nurtured over generations. There are too many sylvan lyrics, orations, and eulogies to count. The current reputation of Billie Holiday's recording of “Strange Fruit” (1939) belies the fact that far more Americans of her era listened to renditions of “Trees,” including one by Paul Robeson. The banality of tree talk both signals and obscures the importance of “tree culture,” a settler movement of the long nineteenth century. This term stands for a set of values and practices: the arboricultural “improvement” of gardens and forests, cities and parks, wastelands and homesteads. Tree culture also inspired the planting of memory—the designation of “historic trees” that had “witnessed” moments of national significance. The making of the nation was naturalized by memorable events that took place, or putatively took place, under this very tree. Nationalists wrapped historic trees in flags, literally and figuratively, and honored them with names, poems, paintings, and plaques; they collected bits and pieces for relic boxes and civic reliquaries. Arbonationalism thrived on wars and anniversaries, and especially anniversaries of wars.2

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