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Street Tree Stories: On the Politics of Nature in the City

October 19, 2016 | Sonja Dümpelmann

Street Tree Pruning in the Bronx, New York City, ca 1913. New York City Department of Parks and Recreation
Street Tree Pruning in the Bronx, New York City, ca 1913. New York City Department of Parks and Recreation

Sonja Dümpelmann is a landscape historian and associate professor of landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her publications include Flights of Imagination: Aviation, Landscape, Design (University of Virginia Press, 2014), A Cultural History of Gardens in the Age of Empire (Bloomsbury Publishers, 2013), Women, Modernity, and Landscape Architecture (with John Beardsley; Routledge, 2015), Greening the City: Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century (with Dorothee Brantz; University of Virginia Press, 2011), and a book on the Italian landscape architect Maria Teresa Parpagliolo and landscape architecture in twentieth-century Italy (VDG Weimar, 2004). She is currently writing a book on the history of street tree planting and urban forestry.

A screening and discussion of the documentary film “City of Trees” (Meridian Hill Pictures, 76 min., 2016) will be held for Dumbarton Oaks fellows, staff, and docents in the Oaks Room of the Fellowship House (1700 Wisconsin Avenue) from 5 to 7 p.m. that evening (October 19). The conversation will be led by directors Brandon Kramer and Lance Kramer, Sonja Dümpelmann, and Washington Parks & People Director Steve Coleman.