Narrative | Lost Trees in Ottawa

Trees are our largest living companions. Their longevity can easily exceed ours. In the woods or the forest we feel at home, safe in their company, along with myriads of other life forms.

In the city we used to adore our street trees. Our dwellings were made from the trees around us, insides trimmed with their produce.

But now we spurn the warmth of their wood, we no longer value the breathing canopy above us.

This collection explores the Lost Trees in the city of Ottawa and invites us to contemplate what we are forsaking.

Click on an image to view a larger version. To scroll through the whole series, you may prefer to view the gallery.

Life Cycle

Even in death the tree provides
nutrients and support for new growth.
Decay gives nursery life to new trees

Reflection

Whereas our distorted poor reflection
of life in urban glass
neglects this vital principle.
Lampposts, sentinels, look on.

A Lost Tree

And that ‘life’ pushes out the arboreal life,
a rampant ‘e’ struggling
to escape the rectilinear bricks.

Soviet architecture

And serried ranks of identical dwellings
overwhelm the individual, tree-scaled homes.

Lost lights

Even windows seem to have been forgotten in this aspect, which highlights the “mechanical rooms” by making them two storeys greater.

Lost channel

Until communication towers are
the only sensible adornment in the blank,
eyeless walls and rooflines.

Lost architecture

Uncertainty attempts to camouflage
with shades of blue and inharmonious
unrepeated patterns.

Overpowering

And balconies that offer the only status symbol
in an otherwise top heavy structure.

Cartesian order

With orthogonal, Cartesian mapping of
distorted other worlds towering over
the lofty and inspiring elements of the past.

Lost churches

But in vain the spires reach, or the trees struggle,
to speak their wisdom against the windful canyons
of urban excess.

Red line

And the Red Line is passed, trees now lost
irretrievably against the jumble of styles and grey brick.

Lost cloud

Until even the spirit of the trees escapes,
unnoticed as a wisp of cloud from the blackness.

Construction cranes

And the only clouds are then reflections of the sky
in the banal glass and looming cranes
of further havoc.

Church and its Tree

Soon to be dwarfed by 33 storeys,
and demolished for even more,
this lone tree and lonelier bastion
of community is enveloped.

Harbinger of doom

And reflects within it the disease
that will soon carry it too away.

Gateway

Pride of the “place to be and to be seen”,
towering above our World Heritage Site
and announcing what?

Pale Pastels

More nondescript platitudes of washed out pastels
uncertain window lines
rows of giant slabs of glass
to hide or pretend grandeur?

Alignment

As some would rather do with the entire edifice
that was used to pretend this was going to be
a “Public Space, a Destination”.

Wind

And stake our assertion of Dominion,
free as a wind like the trees below.

Funnelled

Limply mirrored in other harbingers of despair.

Billboards

Or oversize billboards of Shopify and KPMG,
monuments to prosperity.

Luxury

And luxuriously appointed, or so they claim.
do buildings not stand without words?

But not Luxurious

And if only words,
do the writers realise the bitter irony?

Black Gluckstein

Or the stupendously ridiculous hyperbole?
When the blank blackness is all
they offer to the cityscape?

Gluckstein was inspired in a city of wondrous tree-lined streets with human scale Buildings dignified by external detail and restful canals. Not a black and grey monotony