My first year in Houston I began running in Memorial Park. Over the years I had probably hiked every trail, mountain-biked most trails, memorized the Arboretum, and even knew some of the grounds crew who showed me their favorite spots. Until I moved last year, I was still walking around the jogging trail three or four times a week.
Houston City Council approved a plan in 2015 to redesign Memorial Park. Drought, hurricanes, dated amenities, parking, and traffic called for action. Within a year, trees were being thinned to create new trails and open areas. Weekly, new patches of trees would appear with a pink or green ribbon tied around their trunks. Sometimes a numbered, aluminum tag was attached through the bark.
At first there was no rhyme nor reason, but then the unmarked trees started to disappear. Some of these trees were the oaks and pines that edged the trails. These were the trees I would gently pat all those years running and walking. No one else there that sometimes I said hello to certain trees, I love you to others. I was grateful for their shade running, for their presence telling me that I was another quarter mile farther. I had always found their canopy healing and assumed that’s why so many people loved running there.
I started photographing the ribbons around the trees before the chainsaws ever started, waiting until the arborists had left for the day so I could sneak past the orange fencing with Keep Out signs. The pink ribbons reminded me of my sister’s breast cancer and the breast cancer of a colleague at the college who I called Songbird. And so many others.
Having owned land and trimmed trees before, even just pruning a houseplant to ensure a long life, I understood the need to thin the woods. But it wasn’t apparent that the trees’ lives were being honored or respected. My photographs were a way to document them…as visual meditations on life and death. Some taken very young, some taken after a life that started before there was ever the thought of a park at all.
The next year, I had driven to Bryan Beach State Park near Freeport one day during the week. I loved that beach because no one was ever there on a weekday and I could drive my pickup down to the end and walk for hours. The lack of people meant that there was always something interesting that had washed up. And the birds there were remarkable, on both sides of the dunes. There were always dolphins traveling back and forth from the mouth of the Brazos River to the harbor entrance at Surfside.
This one day, however, once I parked, I noticed butterflies all along the edge of the water. Dried up on the still moist sand. Struggling to dry out and fly again but weighted down by a shell or packed sand on the edge of a wing. Flapping in a tidal pool.
There were also Sulphur and Black Swallowtail butterflies.
I started saving the ones I could find that looked hearty. I laid them in my truck’s bed to dry on T-shirts and a beach towel. Soon there were dozens and the truly strong ones I carried to the blooms of the endless vines that held the dunes together.
Again I was in the middle of a struggle between life and death and so I stated taking photographs. Once home, I got to researching and found that there is an annual southern migration of Gulf Fritillary butterflies each fall. Some years they are so thick as they ready their journey across the Gulf that people can’t leave their homes without walking into them. There were accounts from Brownsville, Aransas Pass, and the Kenedy Ranch.
When it came time to print favorite photos, I also printed diptychs of trees next to butterflies. The life and death seemed to balance out. Trees rooted in the earth with their pink ribbons screaming “I will live”. Butterflies blown down into the waves in a storm and washed onto shore.
In the end, the work was a bit depressing. Apart from hanging 2 or 3 outside my studio for a month, I have never shown them.