When is a tree not a tree? When it’s the Tree of Trees, a 21-metre-high steel storage rack of saplings, designed by Thomas Heatherwick. The designer’s latest abuse of natural metaphors now looms on the street corner outside Buckingham Palace, its spiralling brown “trunk” of hefty steel tubes rising to support big steel “branches”, carrying dozens of little windswept trees in aluminium pots.
It is supposed to be the celebratory symbol of the The Queen’s Green Canopy (QGC), a nationwide tree-planting initiative honouring the platinum jubilee, described by Heatherwick as “an incredible community campaign that’s literally changing the landscape of our nation”. After this weekend’s celebrations, the 350 British native trees – ranging from silver birch and rowan to larch, hornbeam and hazel – will be “gifted to selected community groups” in the hope of inspiring a new generation of tree planters.
As some have pointed out on Twitter, the result doesn’t quite live up to the Heatherwickian fairytale promise, which saw his vision depicted with the usual misty-eyed bucolic charm of a Gainsborough landscape. Instead, the finished result is more clumsy cloud of steel than lush green canopy, standing as a massively over-engineered structure that recalls a hastily disguised mobile phone mast. Perhaps the Queen will receive ultrafast 5G broadband as a bonus jubilee gift?
It is yet another example of the recent fetish among certain architects and designers for conjuring a cartoonish version of nature, suspending shrubbery and balancing trees in ways that make the plants look decidedly unhappy to be there. It comes just after the comically disastrous Marble Arch Mound, the £6m heap of scaffolding, spindly saplings and withered turf that may have helped topple the local council. It turned out to be the literal hill that the City of Westminster’s Tory leadership chose to die on, according to Labour, who took control of the council for the first time since its creation.
