“Ghost Forest” – 49 Dying Cedar Trees Planted in a Manhattan Park

Artist and architect Maya Lin, known famously for the original design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, has also been a dedicated environmentalist for years.

“’I call them my gentle giants,’ Lin [told Sarah Cascone, of artnet news] at the opening of the exhibition, the trees having been carefully planted amid a tangle of electric utility cables and sprinkler lines buried beneath the park’s lawn. ‘I wanted you to feel like you’re wandering through something intimate. She adds, becoming ‘…a sense of mourning.'”

The intimacy she’s striving for with us is about the degradation of the global environment. In particular, she yearns for us to know about how sea-level rise is introducing fatal amounts of groundwater salinity to the Atlantic white cedar trees along the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. The stand of 49 installed in Madison Square Park are each some 80 years old.

“’There is a parallel between a global pandemic and climate change which is also a global threat to humanity,’ she added. ‘By 2100, 50 percent of all species may go extinct due to climate change.’”

(photo credits: Maya Lin Studio)