In the ‘Ghost Forest’ by Maya Lin ’81 MArch ’86, the Trees Are Talking Back

The artist and architect Maya Lin ’81 MArch ’86 began her career with a response to a war. Her 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, a blade of black granite slashed into American soil, commemorates a “foreign” war that became an internal one and divided the nation. Her installation, “Ghost Forest,” which was on view in Madison Square Park in Manhattan through Nov. 14, is commemorative too. It’s a sky-reaching memorial to a war in progress directed against everything we call Nature.

Commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservancy, “Ghost Forest” is basically a reconstituted patch of damaged nature. From the coastal Pine Barrens of New Jersey, Lin brought to Manhattan 49 full-grown Atlantic white cedars, each around 40 feet tall, and planted them together at the center of a bosky Madison Square Park. In the context of the park’s arboreal luxe they make an odd sight, because they’re leafless, and clearly dead or dying.

They’d been harvested from a habitat infiltrated by salt water, a result of climate change. Salt water is poison for trees; it rots them from within. Sick beyond saving, the cedars now in the park had been cleared from their original home to make room for a regeneration effort.

Read more about “Ghost Forest” at this New York Times article.