Brandon O. Scott

My dissertation, “The American Grove: A Nineteenth-Century Vegetal Aesthetic,” is divided into two parts, one on American elm (Ulmus americana) and one on longleaf pine (Pinus palustris). The project shows how both trees cultivated unique sensibilities and sensitivities in the human communities dwelling underneath them, making them attentive not just to the qualities of the trees, but also to the qualities of the places in which plant and person found themselves growing. In a way, each tree “instructed” its community in the creation of landscapes. For the settlers and later citizens of New England, American elm generated an aesthetic of nature whose task became the cultivation of a historical imagination through which they could naturalize and give lasting roots to their claims upon lands first taken from Native Americans and then wrested from Britain. Longleaf pine, a southern tree, offered very different possibilities. Worked mostly by slaves, later freed men, and poor Whites, it was not originally used as ornament but as a resource, turned not just into timber but also into the various supplies for naval stores (turpentine, tar, pitch, rosin). Given its manifold material possibilities and the particulars of the longleaf industry, the tree produced an aesthetic of labor intimately related to the culture of those who worked it. 

Two trees, then, instead of an artist, movement, or medium, define my research parameters. Though it may seem unusual to organize a project in art history through trees instead of through the usual categories, given the larger history of aesthetics, which was once as much, if not more so, concerned with our experiences of nature as it was with our experiences of art, the project makes historic sense as much as it will hopefully make a contemporary contribution to rethinking what aesthetics can be, who can claim to have such experiences, and how trees are not just aesthetic objects but also agents.