Have you ever noticed a “volunteer” (not intentionally planted) tree in your neighborhood or a natural area and wondered how it got there, and if it is related to other trees nearby?

M Hamilton has, and they became so curious about black walnut trees in particular that their curiosity and questions eventually led to graduate work at UW–Madison. In addition to pursuing an MFA and a PhD in visual cultures, M was also a 2024 Arboretum Research Fellow. This fall, they will offer free small group walking conversations about black walnut tree collectives along the western boundary of the Arboretum. To join a walk, please register through Eventbrite by September 25 – and bring your curiosity!

We asked M to share more about the meaning and experience of the walks, and about how they approach and incorporate art, theory, and scientific research into their work. You can learn more in the Q&A below.

– Susan Day, communications manager

Why do you focus on walnut trees, and why is the Arboretum boundary of particular interest?

I became familiar with black walnut trees when I farmed in Garrard County, Kentucky. I knew the trees as members of the local ecology, and I was curious about their lifeways. They followed the small creek that ran through my farm. One massive old tree lived higher up on the property, and young trees grew on the banks down-slope. They grew under and over fences and culverts. I knew them as squirrel-familiars, and as a tree that artists work with to make dye. I knew them as messy neighbors that stained my gravel drive.

When I moved to Madison for graduate school and saw black walnut trees growing in city back lots, I had a suspicion that they were not planted there intentionally by the city but likely grew themselves. They were familiar to me in a place where not much else was. I also noticed that they were isolated in their parking lots, and I began to wonder about their processes of world-making in the city. Where were the multiple generations, and what kind of multi-species interactions impact their lives as they live here? What is my obligation to give attention and care to the systems of life that lived here long before I did, and live here now?

Driving into the UW Arboretum one day, I noticed a very large, old black walnut growing quite near the west side entrance gate, and I wondered where the tree’s kin network extends, and how people perceive a tree growing inside the Arboretum and its close relative tree growing in a street median differently. When I began to look for tree relatives on both sides of the fence, I was asking “does the obligation to care for the land end at the exit gate of the Arboretum?”

Why have you taken the approach of offering walks for small groups? What do you hope people will take away from these walks and from your work on walnut tree communities and boundaries?

I offered walks in small groups like this for my MFA thesis exhibition. We walk a short way to specific black walnut trees whose likely close relation to each other has been mapped by the plant geneticists.

The small groups make it possible for our walk to be a conversation rather than a presentation by me. Everyone can ask questions, tell about their own experiences with black walnut trees, and share knowledge together.

What are kinship relations, when talking about trees?

Trees depend on an expansive network for making their worlds. In the case of black walnuts, the kin relations I am thinking of includes other walnut trees but also depends on squirrels and can also include people.

I am looking for black walnut progenitor trees and offspring trees. But even with genetic testing, the nature of the relationships between specific trees remains opaque. This is part of the beauty and mystery of these trees, and of plant reproduction, and it is one of the points I enjoy discussing on the walks.

Every black walnut tree makes separate flowers that pollinate (other trees, or themselves) and flowers that receive pollen from the wind. The reproductive life of black walnut trees is quite queer, and a sapling on the road median that is genetically likely to be closely related to the established tree in the Arboretum might be an offspring due to pollination, an offspring due to a fallen nut that was carried and buried by a squirrel (or person!), an offspring due to ‘selfing,’ or it could even be a 100-year younger sibling tree. The walks offer the joy of imagining how tree kin groups move across the boundary line.

Would you briefly talk about the intersection of art, ecology, geography, and interpretive theories that informs and shapes your work?

Curiosity is where scientific inquiry and critical creative engagements with the world (art!) intersect. Questions about how and why, questions about who we are in relation to the world, and finally questions that begin with what if are at the root of both artistic and scientific inquiry. They are also essential to the theoretical foundations of my work, which is queer, feminist, and anti-colonial. These frameworks shape my questions and my practice, because based on them, I move and act with hope that we can build a more just world in the present.

I start from the position that we are so deeply influenced by our environments that we become who we are in relation to the places we live, while the environments we live in are simultaneously deeply shaped by us. My work also grows out of a sense of obligation to care, with action and attention, to the places in which I live. This includes attention to political and social actions that continue to form those places: I am part of a system, not external to the system. This is true from the microscopic scale to the political and planetary scale.

How has your experience as an Arboretum Research Fellow shaped your research and professional goals?

I am honored to have had the opportunity to work as an Arboretum Research Fellow. The cohort that I came in with has been deeply inspiring, and I look forward to our continued relationships and seeing how our careers develop.

I had the chance to speak about my work at the Research Symposium in late winter, and the conversations that I had afterward with Arboretum visitors were very generative. I hope that I will see many of those same visitors on my walks.

Is there anything you’d like to add?

You can read more about this work at the project website!

(To join a walk, please register through Eventbrite by September 25 – and bring your curiosity!)