Zebra Trees and Boundary Lines: Hope Springs Imaginal
An Arts Afield Project
MacLeish Field Station, Smith College
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Approximately 12’ x 15’ x 5’, paint, acrylic marker, wood, chrome plated steel, upcycled wood, aluminum and acrylic
Zebra Trees and Boundary Lines: Hope Springs Imaginal grew out of a relationship between Leduc and a decomposing birch in Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in 2021. Three years later, Leduc encountered a rhyming “Zebra Tree” at MacLeish Field Station and has since witnessed the falling and ongoing decomposition of Zebra Trees across geographic designations. As the trees alter their states, they mentor Leduc with measured wisdom regarding scales of reliability, experiences of liminality, and black-and-white, linear constructs.
Visitors are welcome to embody a state of non-dual dynamism by walking on the logs, an echo of the piece’s positioning along the crest of two watersheds (and the orientation of all entities). From the logs, framed, plein air artifacts of the artist’s acquaintance with four locations within MacLeish reach out and up physically and energetically. Their color, gesture, transparency, and reflection represent—and invite others into—playful moments of porosity and participation with and as an ever-expanding, relational whole.
To view Zebra Tree research documentation and ongoing artwork, please follow this link to “The Zebra Tree.”
For additional concepts behind the “plein air artifacts,” please follow this link to “Field Marks.”
BOUNDLESS ENGAGEMENT
If additional inspiration is helpful, please refer to the following drop-downs. These include Experience Mapping exercises composed by eco-psychology professor, Dr. Michele Wick, as well as additional external resources, linked further below.
Please note: You are encouraged to reflect wherever is most comfortable, be it physically with the artwork or elsewhere. Engagement modalities are equally open: movement, imagery, music, writing, conversation, thought, sensation…all are worthy means of contemplation and expression.
*For anyone interested in facilitating a specific engagement, please reach out directly here.*
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An exploration from Dr. Michele Wick
To begin, we will take an account of your sensory and emotional intersection with the installation and forest as a whole.
Sensory accounting:
In the presence of Zebra Trees and Boundary Lines, record the sights, sounds, smells, and textures in the area around you. (“Recording” can be with thoughts, words, photos, drawings, etc.)
Emotional accounting:
What emotions do you feel in the presence of Zebra Trees and Boundary Lines? If you’re having trouble naming your feelings, click here for a list.
Please continue to the prompts next to each image below; we will return to the whole at the very end. However, should you prefer not to complete the exercise linearly, that is okay! You are welcome to start and stop wherever you prefer.
ZEBRA TREES
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Striking, Illusory Patterns; Grief and the Magic of Dissolution
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In his poem Ars Poetica, Archibald MacLeish wrote: a poem should not mean/But be.
How might the Zebra Tree “be” for the forest?
How might the Zebra Tree “be” for you?
VERNAL POOL
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Reflected Light on Temporal Water; Push and Pull of the Unseen
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As winter wanes, a hollow fills with snow melt, spring rain, and rising ground water. Frogs, spring peepers, fairy shrimp – all kinds of amphibians and invertebrates -- revel. When summer’s dry heat rises, the pool vanishes, but not the promise of more joy. Next year.
What fills your hollows with joy?
GHOST PIPE ENCLAVE
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Gusting, Rustling Wind; Emergence of the Unexpected
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Monotropa Uniflora – Ghost Pipe. Poet Emily Dickenson’s “preferred flower of life.” Translucent white windflower. Sun shy. Feeding on fungi instead. There is more than one way for flowers to thrive.
How are you different from other “flowers?”
How do you thrive?
MOSSY STREAM
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Sparkling, Trickling Water; Fluidity and an undercurrent of Being Held
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Moss. Still. Soft. So fragile – and yet. Moss stabilizes stream banks. It dissolves rocks and roots, the granules floating through wandering waters, feeding life in all its forms.
What is your stealth strength?
Who or what do you feed? How? Why?
CHESTNUT GROVE
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A Textured, Ecotonal Threshold; Perpetual Dynamism and Scales of Transitions
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Chestnut Grove
It is said that when the chestnut trees bloomed in July, the forest would shimmer. When their petals dropped, it was like summer snow. Won’t it be glorious to see them again.
Who do you miss?
What do you wish to restore?
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Sensory mapping:
Refer back to your initial sensory account as well as any additional sensory information you collected as you moved throughout the piece. On a piece of paper (any size), diagram the sensory information you noticed. (You may use any medium of your choice, e.g. pencil, paint, marker, pen, photography, etc.)
Emotional mapping:
Refer back to your initial emotional account as well as any additional emotional information you collected along the way. Consider adding these emotions to your sensory map. How will you notate them?
Take a moment to reflect. Notice how your sensory experiences and emotions connect. What surprised you?
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
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A Conversation with Dr. Amy Zanne, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, 2025
The hard Science on hardwoods! Dr. Zanne is affiliated with Cary—which is affiliated with Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, the location of the OG Zebra Tree.
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How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human
Eduardo Kohn, University of California Press, 2013
At once scholarly and innate, this book puts words to longstanding, deeply felt practices of boundary perforation.
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Báyò Akómoláfé at Puistokatu 4 with Uniarts Helsinki, 2026
Báyò names binaries of “hope” and “hopelessness,” bound further onto ideas and assumptions. From where might hope spring?
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, Northwestern University Press, 1964, pp. 9–25.
A delightful duet of phenomenology and art! Reverberating still, 60+ years later.
HOW TO ARRIVE
The Smith Collage Ada and Archibald MacLeish Field Station, 80 Poplar Hill Road, South Deerfield, MA 01373
To access Zebra Trees and Boundary Lines: Hope Springs Imaginal, park in MacLeish’s main lot and take the (wide, well maintained) Poplar Trail all the way to the end (just over half a mile).
As you walk, you are invited to notice the difference between your right and left (East and West) sides: two separate watersheds which result in ecological moments that can be quite distinct.
In addition to being situated on this crest, the installation is at a nexus point where the Homestead, Hemlock, and Mountain Laurel Trails somewhat intersect. You are encouraged to explore any number of MacLeish’s possible pathways—as well as your own pathways of possibility.
