The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.1
—Thomas Jefferson

One upas tree overshadows us all. 2
—Frederick Douglass

Before I visited Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia plantation, I read about its Mulberry Row, the ten-foot-wide, thousand-foot-long path “shaded and sheltered by an allée of fruit-producing mulberry trees,”3 where enslaved artisans lived and labored from the 1770s to 1820s. On Monticello’s Mulberry Row, Black girls and others—artistic ancestors of renowned fiber and textile artist Sonya Clark4—wove the fabric that clothed hundreds of people on the Monticello plantation.5 According to historian C. Dierksheide, “Jefferson had various names for this place—‘Mulberry-row’ in 1782, ‘Mulberry Lane’ in 1793, and ‘Mulberry walk’ in 1808.”6 The original rows of mulberry trees at Monticello have not survived, but a new group was planted in 1995.

Although he catalogued far more trees than he planted, Jefferson was deemed “the father of American forestry,” his adoration and respect for trees, like many aspects of his character, aggrandized into mythological proportions. During a dinner conversation in the President’s House in Philadelphia, he once remarked, “The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder.”7 Jefferson drew from more than 160 species of trees, including mulberries, to shape and ornament the Monticello plantation.8 He used these trees like ink to write upon the visual landscape of Monticello’s gardens and grounds, crafting iconic alcoves of shade and vistas of light with their slow growth and patient grandeur.

While Jefferson may have masterminded the arboreal paradise of Monticello, the enslaved Black folks who lived there and at his other plantation, Poplar Forest, tended to and worked closely with the trees. These folks included John Hemmings, the brother of Robert Hemmings, a highly skilled joiner and cabinetmaker born in 1776 who “started his working life as an ‘out-carpenter,’ felling trees and hewing logs, building fences and barns, and helping to construct the log slave dwellings on Mulberry Row.” 9 John worked closely and lovingly with wood, making wooden presents for Jefferson’s grandchildren. He con- structed a lap desk for Jefferson’s granddaughter Ellen that was lost in a shipwreck on the way to Boston. He also crafted much of the woodwork and furniture inside the Monticello house and Poplar Forest. Jefferson was buried in a wooden coffin that is believed to have been made by Hemmings. In a letter to Jefferson dated October 20, 1819, John Hemmings reported on his work at Poplar Forest, writing intimately and in detail about his use of pine and poplar:

dear sir . . . I am now abut the shetters i hav pine enough for stils and reals of 6 windowrs i have got them al radey to put togatehear . . . i am now giting the in sid suff reddy we hav anough poplar but have it to slit with the saw but as it is seaisond we reather have it for fear of scrinking that is all the pine plank we hav hear Mr yeancey sayes that he cand getsom that is enough to do the remandour . . .10

Deeply acquainted with the haven of Virginia’s old-growth forests, John Hemmings channeled the mutability of its trees into his creation of beloved objects of beauty and function, many of which survive to this day.

Toward the end of “Picturing Mulberry Row at Monticello,” a short video on the historic estate’s website, an aerial shot of archaeological excavations of the site shows the large, uncovered roots of a tree intertwined among the brick and stone foundations of living quarters on Mulberry Row.11 This Kentucky coffee tree, dating to the late nineteenth century or early twentieth century,12 perhaps tended and touched by Black hands, held watch over a community of Black people with whom its roots were interwoven.

Thinking about the trees on Mulberry Row at Monticello, I was reminded of Lucille Clifton’s poem “mulberry fields.”13 In the poem, Clifton uplifts the voices and spirits of unnamed enslaved folks who have been buried in graves marked by rocks and stones carelessly disturbed and “piled into a barn” by modern stewards of a plantation on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. In the absence of these “shaped” headstones “scratched with triangles and other forms,” Clifton writes that “wild berries warm a field of bones,” almost as if the trees had comforted the fields with their fruit. In another poem, “at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989,” Clifton again acknowledges the timeless silence created by rocks meant to mark the graves of the enslaved: “among the rocks / at walnut grove / your silence drumming / in my bones,” imploring them to “tell me your names.”14 In both poems, the presence of walnut and mulberry trees marks the absence of the stories and names of enslaved people in a refusal of forgetting, a way to bookmark what has been lost.

In her book Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape, geologist Lauret Savoy writes:

The silence of Walnut Grove’s burying grounds seemed to belie the enslaver’s power to extract work without consent from the enslaved. Not just work, but blood, breath, life itself. Silence reminded me, too, of pieces erased from a many-storied past: complex communities excised, interior lives of “property-in-person” ignored.15

Clifton ends the poem “mulberry fields” by encouraging the seeds that fall on this sacred but “forsaken” ground to “bloom how you must.” This final line seems to remind the ancestors and the reader that what is buried and thrown away about the legacy of slavery is never truly lost. Not only that, these seemingly adrift stories will find a way to come to the surface and into the light of day.

If the mulberry is a humble and ordinary character on the grounds of Monticello—a tree that can grow anywhere, even in soil that is wanting—the tulip poplar is its fancier, grander distant cousin, Jefferson’s Juno, a member of the elegant magnolia family. During a visit to Monticello in January 2024, I saw the remains of a tulip poplar tree that Jefferson had prized as a pet in his gardens and most likely planted in the early 1800s. The original tree on the north side of the house was eventually cut down to a stump in the early 2000s because it was in danger of falling on the structure. After it was cut down, another tulip poplar, connected to the original root stock, began to grow in the middle of the stump.16 For the group of us visiting Monticello that day, this tree sprouting a new generation from its depths, sheltered by the storied walls of the past, became a symbol of the Declaration House project. This grande dame of a tulip poplar stump was electric with the memory of what once was at its very core. And in its presence, we could hear something beyond/between the air around us: the ghosts of the past, insistent on being known and acknowledged.

Walking along Mulberry Row, turning in my palm some of the dirt from under the newly planted mulberry trees, I wondered about the connections and conversations that must have transpired between enslaved people and mulberry trees, and trees in general, on the grounds of Monticello. What must it have felt like for trees and humans alike to be planted far from their point of origin and forced to adapt to strange environs? What did it mean to make a new community out of a forced forest? We were there to learn more about the lives of Robert Hemmings and other enslaved Black folks on Jefferson’s plantation, and the trees at Monticello were talking to us, telling us something about the Black hands and hearts of their caretakers, and the social life of Monticello, friendships and families of ancestors and descendants like a subterranean blues, vibrating with survival.

(this writing, too, an act of weaving)

I am a descendant of trees.

Apple trees from an orchard in Virginia annexed by the army for a fort. My ancestors were forced to abandon their orchard for elsewhere. Apple trees haunt me. My great-grandmother fed me pale morsels of apple from the blade of her paring knife, attempting to re-create memories of an apple I would never taste, that had been lost to generations. After her funeral, I climbed a young tree in our backyard in North Wales, Pennsylvania, and sat in the crook of its arm for hours, talking to the sky, hoping she might hear nine-year-old me. Trees are my chosen family. Trees have always been my telephone line to ancestors.

There were the magnificent trees at my artist residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California17 —eucalyptus trees with limber leaves hanging and swaying like bodies. These trees, smelling so fresh and clean, are hated because they courted the fires raging across California at the end of 2024. They used to be one of many varieties of hanging trees, on which Indigenous, Black, Asian, and Latinx people were murdered. They are some of the country’s youngest “witness trees,” centuries-old trees that were present during a major historical or cultural event. They are also twisted “liberty trees,” what Jared Farmer describes as “landmarks of the civic freedom to commit violence in support of white nationalism . . . vegetal manifestations of toxic masculinity.”18 How many trees still stand as witnesses to lynchings, like Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Haunted Oak,” “burned with dread” by the memory of the horrors done upon them?

I feel the rope against my bark,
And the weight of him in my grain,
I feel in the throe of his final woe
The touch of my own last pain.19

I didn’t expect to learn about a history of lynching trees on the West Coast, but I came across artist Ken Gonzales-Day’s photographs, in which he erases the human bodies from archival lynching photographs, emphasizing and throwing into relief the body of the tree. Gonzales-Day’s project of finding the source of his art through the process of looking at photos and historical documents echoes Clark’s work on “The Descendants of Monticello.” He writes:

It might sound strange to say that the work did not begin as a project about lynching. It was a project about place and the people who inhabited it. . . . It is my hope that the absence inferred in this work may one day be seen as contributing to social justice movements, adding to the history of our nation. . . . 20

In Gonzales-Day’s work, as in Clifton’s poems, trees bear witness to and hold space for those people who have been relegated to the shadows of history.

In the positive and negative space that trees occupy above and below ground, and even inside their core, they hold a powerful presence and absence that is in deep, ancient conversation with all beings on earth. The trees felt things and bear witness. They know the unnamed and home the unlocatable. They are not blind, and they can’t turn away. There are trees that grow alone and don’t talk to other trees. There are trees that grow around a stump like a family. Trees like to grow around other trees. Trees like to be in forests. There is an etiquette to their existence that is troubled by having to grow in private gardens, arboretums, or plantations. They don’t want to be pets. They want to be free, like all of us. They want to live and let live. They want to grow old together. Tree time is like CPT21—they do things when they’re ready and in their own due time. They stay put, though. They must remain on guard as long as they live. They can never escape, even after being felled or burned. The roots lie underground, waiting for renewal.

I wonder about trees as humanity’s first monuments, our first monuments to family and community bonds—y’know, the urge to do/bury/dance/sing/dream up/under/next to/beneath a tree? In Philadelphia, we tell origin stories about trees in our street names and in our folklore, about the Treaty Elm where William Penn acquired the land for the city from the Lenape in 1683. Or we can go back before Penn got there, when the Lenape cultivated the forest with fire, shaping swaths of land like a community garden. Living in Philly, we can’t always forget that we are living in what used to be a fully forested city. Much of the city’s development was located up and down the Delaware River, while the westward areas were not developed. Not far from Declaration House in Washington Square Park, there used to stand Philadelphia’s Moon Tree, a sycamore grown from a seed that had gone to the moon with the Apollo 14 mission but that ultimately didn’t survive life in Philadelphia, in America, or on Earth. This tree was planted in honor of the country’s Bicentennial in 1976, the year I was born, in a park that used to be a potter’s field and a cemetery for Black people.22 What sagacious and wily things would Octavia Butler have said about this Moon Tree trying to grow in that solemn soil and failing? I think of the early Philadelphia trees that Robert Hemmings must have encountered among the arboreal grid of city streets, on the outskirts of the city near the Declaration House on Seventh and Market where he stayed with Jefferson as he wrote the Declaration of Independence. The streets nearby were then named for trees: Cedar (now South), Pine, Spruce, Walnut, Chestnut, Mulberry (now Arch), and Sassafras (now Race).23 These trees, like Hemmings, were observers and stewards of the revolutionary spirit churning in the city. I imagine him seeking the shade of some of these trees when waiting for Jefferson or running his errands in the summer of 1776, when temperatures could be “in the upper 80s or low 90s.”24 Or avoiding the whipping post, possibly made from an oak tree, at Second and Market. Maybe encountering the work of enslaved Africans who felled wood to make room for farm lands25 reminded him of his brother John back in Virginia. Perhaps he visited Southeast Square,26 also known as Congo Square, only a few minutes’ walk from the site of the Declaration House. Congo Square in Philadelphia was a place where free and enslaved folks gathered to find joy through song and dance, and to bury their dead. 27 Hemmings would have seen it years before it was converted from pasture to park with plantings of Lombardy poplars in 1794.28 Like its counterpart in New Orleans, where the magnificent Eggun Tree or Ancestor Tree, a live oak, held center stage, Congo Square in Philadelphia, even without many trees, was a sacred space to commune with ancestors and spirits.

Trees are the souls of men,
Reaching skyward
And while each soul
Draws nearer God
Its dark roots cleave
To earthly sod. . . .29

At Monticello, as we visited the graves of enslaved folks, Clark told us about how scholar and writer Imani Perry was writing about periwinkle in the forest as a sign—a haunting—of Black burials.30 Without mortar and stone, they made monuments of what they could grow with their own hands; they made an understory. Monument Lab fellow, artist, activist, writer, and architectural researcher Imani Jacqueline Brown researches and writes about groves of magnolia trees in her home state of Louisiana that have sprung up to mark and remember the burial of enslaved ancestors. In “black ecologies: an opening, an offering,” she writes, “Black ecologies wink into existence as resistance to plantation ecologies. Ecological resistance emerges from the cypress trees in whose crowns we crouch, muskets over shoulders, listening for dogs. . . .”31 In other words, the cypress trees have done more than remember; they have guarded and had our backs.

the forest a free jazz.
the body of a tree, free jazz.
improvisation all over
the place.

The giant redwoods of Muir Woods, something to see on my bucket list, were finally checked off during my travels in California. As I walked through the giant cathedral of trees with my residency housemate Hanna Tuulikki, she talked about the enchanted forests in her mother's home of Finland and the ways that folks there regard the forest, an army or neighborhood of trees, with awe and terror. That day, in one of the oldest forests in North America, we trespassed into the bowels of trees and tasted wild clover at their trunk-feet.

I came home to Philadelphia still looking for meaning in trees and my life with trees as a Black woman, someone who has spent most of her life in the suburbs and city. Wondering, as I often do, about how to reclaim the apple orchards annexed by the army. How to reclaim that talking grandmother of a tree in my backyard, now disappeared by a fence a neighbor put up without asking. Or the tree out front that the potter who once lived in my house planted to make a Japanese garden here in my Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, about eight miles northwest of Declaration House; a little like Jefferson, she sought to create a paradise where there used to be old forest. No one can tell us what kind of tree it is; one of the older neighbors once said it was an overgrown shrub.

And how to decode the mystery of Maple Street, the place where our family home in Ambler, Pennsylvania, used to exist. Or the crimson-red Acer palmatum in my mother’s backyard, the one with the long arm that could not withstand our swinging or lounging upon with a good book. Or the green Japanese maple baby that my love, Mark, brought home from Shofuso,32 which I planted while six months pregnant and is now a strong and sturdy fifteen-year-old like my son, Thelonious. Or the gloriously thick silver maple tree in our backyard that heaved down its final heavy limb across the patio, just minutes after m dad had asked for my forgiveness for being absent for three decades of my life and we had walked back into the house more family than we’d ever been. This life with trees is no joke. The relationship between humans and trees is elemental—and for Black folks, essential—to remember and reclaim. Like the tree-shaped scar of slavery’s brutality upon Sethe’s back in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved or the pear tree of Janie’s life and sexual awakening in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, trees embody Black memory and magic and an unbreakable bond across centuries of struggle.

There’s a reason why we call them “family trees.” Sitting around a table at Monticello, flipping through scrapbooks of Polaroids with the team of the Getting Word African American History Department, I thought of Etheridge Knight’s poem “The Idea of Ancestry.” In the poem, he ponders the “47 black faces” in photographs of family members taped to the “gray stone wall” of his jail cell. The photographs arranged on the wall become a visual family tree that Etheridge can reflect and meditate upon. They are evidence of family bonds, activated and renewed by the “falling leaves” of autumn outside the jail that “stir [his] genes,” a cue and a symbol of family connections that are broken through change and circumstance, seasons of survival.33

Growing up without my birth father, not meeting him until my wedding day at age thirty, I have been a blank space in the family tree. This painful sense of my own blank space in our history has made me the family genealogist, looking for ancestors like my life depended on it. Trying to make sense of the missing, the unknown. And I think about the apple-tree ancestors too. The ones that were talking to us before we had to leave and go north, like samaras or winged fruits, maple keys alighting, spinning into new directions, carrying the seeds of our futures. The original trees we tended down south, missing our touch.

As we walked through the church of trees at Muir Woods, Hanna kept saying there’s so much we can learn from trees. One of the first things we saw when entering the forest was a squadron of younger trees surrounding an older, burned-out stump, similar to the tulip-poplar shell at Monticello. The signage in front of this grouping is titled “Family Circles” and reads:

Hundreds of years ago a single large redwood grew here. Then disaster struck. The trunk of the large redwood was killed, perhaps by repeated and severe wildfire. . . . Despite such terrible damage, the tree did not die. Below the ground, its massive root system was full of vitality. Before long, hundreds of young, bright green burl sprouts began to come up around the circle formed by the root crown of the original tree.34

Reading and witnessing this display of intergenerational care, I recalled that like us, trees know how to make families out of distance and disaster, out of love lost. We have always been listening to and mimicking the trees. As my friend and colleague Kerry Bickford has said, “The relationship extends beyond roots, too, to the many ways seeds have evolved to move and take flight. Fruit evolved so that our bodies would consume and carry seeds. Symbiosis so foundational we often forget.”

I know now we are a family of maple trees. The color of whiskey, the color of charcoal, the color of asbestos ash. A long line of trees stretching back through time. A slow drag across Earth, against death. We breathe the tall air, sometimes luscious, sometimes laced. And you can try to kill us, but living is just what we do. Life is a family heirloom, a grove of silver maples, endangered and unprotected, our sad-sweet sap an acquired taste. Like a row of mulberries, we can grow anywhere—Norway, Brazil, Los Angeles, Virginia, Ambler. Sometimes we stay where we’re planted, tending to the older trees, the baby cousins. We are medicine and balm for the world, the squirrel, the moth and woodpecker, the deer.

Yes, the trees are like us and more than us. We can see our faces in their bark, the phenomenon of pareidolia (a form of haunting). They have eyes called burls. A tree’s burl stores the same genetic material as the tree itself. It’s a way for a tree to clone itself. For coastal redwoods in their forest setting, burls are the buds of new trees sprouting from the fallen or felled. New roots and buds are signs of regeneration. It’s worth mentioning here Clark’s work with the symbolism of trees in her own practice in 2002, including mitosis,35 with branches of copper reaching across the work seeking a kinship with one another, and roots and branches,36 which illustrates a familial resemblance between a branch made out of copper and another made out of human hair. In two trees,37 two branches woven out of black thread grow straight from a scalp, evoking the patterns of regrowth in Muir Woods and Monticello.38 Similarly, the eyes of “The Descendants of Monticello,” descendants of Robert Hemmings, their roots entangled with Jefferson’s, are burls on the tree of this country; they are monuments as earthly and otherworldly as a tree becoming itself. If ancestors live in our souls and in our eyes, as Clark insists, not just in our music or poems but in our very essence, then the eyes of “The Descendants of Monticello” are the soul of a young Black man peering into a two-faced America.

The Declaration House project and Clark’s “The Descendants of Monticello” move us toward a definition of monument that is embodied as sentinel, as witness, as treetop, as burl—an old-new tree that watches over us, whose fruits feed us, that holds our freedoms and unfreedoms.39 Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture,40 born thirty-five years after Hemmings and three years after Hemmings was freed by Jefferson, famously said, “In overthrowing me, you have overthrown only the trunk of the tree of liberty; but the roots remain; they will push out again, because they are numerous, and go deep into the soil.”41 Declaration House is an outgrowth of the many daily rebellions that allowed Hemmings’s spirit to carry on through his descendants as well as the effort and impulse of many generations of Black folks, a pushing out, a reaching skyward, a going deep for a freedom not promised, but inherent.

About Declaration House

During the drafting of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Thomas Jefferson and enslaved valet Robert Hemmings spent several months at 700 Market Street in Philadelphia. The editors and contributors to Declaration House reflect on the history of this site and illuminate the entangled legacy of freedom and enslavement at the core of our nation’s founding. They expand our history by revisiting and mapping this historic place in the city and nation, past and present, as a way to tend to our democracy today.

At the center of the book is artist Sonya Clark’s revelatory public artwork “The Descendants of Monticello,” a multichannel video installation created in collaboration with Hemmings’ collateral descendants and others who are related to the hundreds of people enslaved at Monticello. Interviews and essays about the project and the site consider history, memory, and the founding of our country. Like Clark’s project, Declaration House asks the timely question, "What does the Declaration of Independence mean to us today?"

Edited by Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Paul M. Farber, and Yolanda Wisher.

Buy Declaration House >

Image Credit: Still from “Picturing Mulberry Row at Monticello,” timestamp 4:17.