Themes

Establish or Enhance the Visibility and Value for “Witness” Landscape Features

Stewardship of places of memory that provide direct connections to people and events includes landscape features (for example, the “Survivor Tree” at the World Trade Center Memorial), as well as buildings. In the United States, the concept of “witness trees,” often interpreted at Revolutionary and Civil War battle sites, is common and offers a sense of immediacy and living, tangible personal connections with a historic event. Stewardship and management, along with on-site and online interpretation, documentation, and even propagation of historically significant genetic biotic resources such as witness trees, as well as other living and non-living landscape features, are essential components of the storytelling.

Today there are mature canopy trees at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., that “witnessed” the student protest of 1988, and canopy and flowering trees in Grant Park in Chicago that stood (and perhaps shaded participants) during the 1968 protests during the Democratic National Convention. Yet, they are not identified as such.

Grant Park, Chicago, Illinois. Photo by Scott Shigley, 2024.

The imperative of making these landscape features visible and valued underscores their inextricable power and strengthens the overall narrative that connects present-day visitors with those that came before us. In addition, there is another avenue specifically for documenting “witness trees.” The National Park Service, which manages listings in the National Register of Historic Places and National Historic Landmark designations, has an ever-growing repository that documents significant trees as part of the Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS), of which each of the sites in this Landslide report should take advantage.