On the subway ride home I looked more into the trees of Fort Greene Park. It turns out that many, probably this one included, were planted when the park was first designed in in the 1860s by landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, with the intention of featuring trees from around the world. You can do a “tree tour” of the park following a map (the Himalayan White Pine in the Southeast corner is number 15).
I was reminded of the Glyptoteket’s Winter Garden in Copenhagen, where with fishing nets hanging from the ceiling the artist Alia Farid interrogated the process of transporting palm trees - and other objects - from their local habitats to create an environment for Europeans to enjoy. The movement of trees echoes that of humans of course, transplanted voluntarily, and involuntarily, and through processes in-between the two, from place to place, continent to continent.
On reflection I’ve come to see the pine another way. As neither severed and sad, nor oblivious to its displacement, but as an honest connection between North America’s Atlantic Coast (specifically, Brooklyn, New York City) and the towering Himalayas so many thousands of miles away - where other white pines brush their fronds through the sky.
