Trees,Wood,and Paper: Materialities of Urban Arboriculture in Modern Berlin

Berlin Street Trees

With Berlin’s development into a modern metropolis in the second half of the nineteenth century, paper—at times even a product of street trees—began to provide a medium to rationalize management processes and turn the trees into seemingly lifeless ornaments and street furniture. In the process, street trees became standardized “bureaucratic objects” that were to be managed comprehensively. ⁴ Conversely, by the 1970s, recycled paper provided a medium for “grassroots creativity” and activism to promote and enhance the trees’ lives and life force, and to emphasize their importance in the urban ecosystem. ⁵ Citizens stressed the necessity of treating each tree individually, highlighting its singular value and beauty. Thus, the vulnerable and unpredictable “real” tree that exhibited individuality and was responsive to its environment stood against the “bureaucratic” (or “normal”) tree that was seen as predictable, controllable, durable, and as part of a comprehensive urban forest. ⁶ Paper documents played an important role in negotiating the tension between these two conceptions of the street tree that accompanied its large-scale introduction in cities. During this process, which has lasted more than a century, the recognition of the street trees’ changeable nature and their unpredictability, and the informal citizen initiatives that were both incited and supported by paper documents, began to inform and impact the governments’ formal procedures and documents.

Street tree planting went hand in hand with Berlin’s transformation into one of the major European metropolitan centers and, in 1871, into the capital of the German Reich. Besides the recognition that trees could provide valuable climatological relief and aesthetic embellishment, a number of developments facilitated the implementation of the first tree plantations along Berlin’s inner-city streets. In 1862, the Hobrecht Plan, an urban development plan for the layout of new streets and squares beyond the existing fabric, had—through its provision of wide streets for future traffic and transportation needs—enabled a new urban design paradigm: the establishment of tree-lined medians. In addition, by 1870, the responsibility for street tree planting had passed from the direction of the Department of Forestry and Economy (Forst- und Ökonomie-Deputation) to the new municipal Department of Gardens (Stadtgartenamt) directed by landscape gardener Gustav Meyer. ⁷ Meyer was a disciple of the director of royal Prussian parks and gardens, Peter Joseph Lenné, who in 1840 had prepared a development plan for Berlin that included tree-lined boulevards as organizing structures. In the 1870s and 1880s, Meyer initiated further efforts to plant so many trees along inner-city streets that tree production needed to follow suit, leading to repeated increases in the size of the municipal nurseries in these decades. ⁸ By 1888, 41,500 trees had been planted along streets and on plazas, a number that increased to 46,000 in 1898. ⁹ In its 1903 annual report, the Department of Gardens noted that three hundred streets, extending to a length of about seventy kilometers, had been planted with trees. ¹⁰

Around the turn of the century, it had become standard in German cities to plant urban streets with trees, but the practice had elicited doubt only a few decades before. After all, as landscape gardener G. A. Schulze had written in 1881, “Forest character and the urban hustle and bustle; holy dignity and serenity, and mundane noise are no doubt opposites.” ¹¹ Indeed, from its beginning until today, the systematic planting of trees along city streets has provoked criticism by city officials and citizens alike. As much as street trees have been thought of as improvements to the urban environment, they have also been considered a nuisance. Tree roots can interfere with and damage underground cables and pipes, their canopies can intercept light and obstruct views, falling limbs and branches create hazards, fallen fruit and leaves can lead to slips, and insects and small debris from trees can sully clothing.

But despite these complaints, many of which are still common today, late nineteenth-century urban engineers and designers like Reinhard Baumeister and Joseph Stübben had already argued for street tree planting and given extensive instructions in their handbooks on urban design. ¹² Plant experts sanctioned street tree planting in the professional press, and, in 1901, the German Association of Garden Artists issued a booklet titled General Rules for the Planting and Care of Trees in Cities. The association organized tree species into different “classes,” depending on the trees’ characteristics and adaptability to the various types of urban streets and environments. For example, the association listed American sycamore, black poplar, Scotch elm, and the field elm cultivar “umbraculifera” as smoke-resistant species, whereas California maple ash, pin oak, and silver linden were considered less well-adapted to polluted urban areas. ¹³ Aside from the municipal nurseries, the biggest private tree nursery in Berlin, which had been in the hands of the Späth family since its establishment as a vegetable and flower nursery in 1720, delivered many trees for Berlin’s streets. The Späth nursery had begun printing product lists and catalogs in 1856. ¹⁴ By 1920, it was not only publishing instructions for street tree planting and care but also listing what were considered the most beautiful and adapted street tree species. Trees with colorful foliage, trees with a small canopy, and trees with beautiful flowers were cataloged in special subcategories. ¹⁵

The new interest in systematically lining urban streets with trees highlighted both the vulnerability of trees and their relative permanence. Given the care that trees required due to their growth, life cycles, and the adverse conditions of the urban environment, systematic planting and treatment could save labor and costs. Yet early arboricultural practices and their representations on paper sought to standardize and fix trees rather than cater to their ephemeral, temporal, and malleable qualities. Paper provided a medium to determine the location of street trees along city streets and thereby contributed to their introduction into the urban fabric in the first place. In an effort to recognize street trees’ importance as an urban design element, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century use of paper to survey, document, and record trees tended to stress their durability and relative permanence. Only later, by the middle of the twentieth century, did municipal governments try to accommodate for the unpredictability of tree growth by introducing new paper formats like index cards. The systematic planting of trees along streets meant that trees were planted in series, a practice that since the late nineteenth century has been supported by various methods in turn requiring different paper formats and techniques: tree templates, lists, cards, maps, and charts.

Tree Series

Around the turn of the century, the series was a fundamental concept in urban arboriculture. It was conceived of in three ways. Spatially, it was understood as a row or continued spatial succession of trees at more or less regular intervals. Temporally, it was understood as a number of trees of one kind succeeding trees of another kind over time. Pictorially, it was understood as a sequence of similar images. Seriality in urban arboriculture was not only a representational tool but also an aesthetic and a practice, and paper was used to both produce and document serial street tree planting.

In the late nineteenth century, most tree experts, urban planners, and landscape gardeners agreed that trees needed to be planted at equal distances along one side or both sides of the street. Street trees were to be planted according to a uniform planting pattern and their canopies were to be as uniform as possible. Although the planting of straight rows of one species of tree quickly became the standard practice, it also produced unease, even among some of the most ardent street tree promoters and modern city builders. Urban planner Joseph Stübben and city garden director Carl Hampel, for example, questioned whether trees should indeed be planted in monotonous rows. But it was hard to argue against the benefits of systematic serial street tree planting. It could unify disharmonious facades along a street and provide an even line of shade in the summer, and it was relatively easy to manage. Even if most tree experts and city builders welcomed uniformity, it was also important to have variety. To prevent monotony and a potential “corridor effect,” Stübben and Hampel suggested that trees could be planted in offset rows along a street and that different species could be used in the various street sections. For example, Stübben reported on the success of breaking up long rows of elms by horse chestnuts at street crossings. Stübben also advised that the variety of the trees’ life cycles was as important to keep in mind as their various appearances. Along Hamburg’s streets, oak trees and mountain ash had successfully been planted in an alternating pattern. But Stübben cautioned that as soon as the oaks had developed a wide canopy, it was important to fell the faster growing mountain ash, as the aesthetic effect would otherwise become too unwieldy. Hampel, trained as a landscape gardener, introduced the effects of leaf forms and canopy colors into the discussion, arguing that although variety was desirable, tree differences should be subtle. ¹⁶ In 1903, his colleague Hermann Lüdtke pointed out that even if trees with a globular canopy were alternated with those of a pointed form, tree canopies and the overall planting pattern needed to appear in a regular order. ¹⁷

Despite some variability, regularity and uniformity were key. Incidentally, the ordered, serial planting of street trees also facilitated tree care and maintenance. Trees planted at regular intervals between the curb and the sidewalk could be pruned more efficiently and sprayed more easily from vehicles and machines on the street. They could also be inventoried and surveyed more economically.

Even when the location of driveways, street lamps, underground cables, canals, and gas pipes rendered it impossible to establish rows of trees with equal distances, efforts were undertaken to make street tree rows appear regular and uniform. As Aachen’s city gardener Carl Heicke explained in 1896, for this purpose site visits were indispensable, and a plan illustrating all existing infrastructure was needed to probe, measure, and determine the best distribution and distances between trees. ¹⁸ By the 1930s, consultations about new street tree planting in Berlin included copied paper plans that were distributed for sign-off among the various municipal departments in charge of water, electricity, gas, telegraph lines, and public transportation. A series of plans resulted, each of which highlighted a specific infrastructural element and noted potential conflicts with the proposed planting design (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Series of street tree-planting plans for Prenzlauer Allee between Danziger Straße and Gustav Adolf Straße, highlighting (from top to bottom) tram, gas lines and pipes, electric cables, water pipes, water drains, police cables, and telegraph lines, 1935.

Tree Templates

To achieve the desired regularity of street tree plantings, attention to the distance between trees did not suffice. A model street tree needed to be produced. Already in the 1880s, landscape gardener G. A. Schulze had described the “Musterbaum” or model tree, understood as a tree which resisted soil compaction and gas, and that had a straight stem, a symmetrical round canopy, and smooth leaves that were retained into the autumn. ¹⁹ To create and maintain this ideal street tree and its aesthetic appeal as part of a series meant maintaining symmetrical crowns, as asymmetry signified improper care and disease.

To facilitate the large-scale production of vital street trees of the same symmetrical form and dimension, in 1887, dendrologist Ludwig Beißner introduced into German arboriculture a new optical instrument, the dendroscope (Figure 2). ²⁰ This handy contrivance, which consisted of a piece of cardboard with a hole in the shape of a tree, had been invented in France in the 1860s by the count Amédée Joseph de Pérusse des Cars. Presented at the 1867 Universal Exposition in Paris, it captured the attention of German as well as other foreign foresters. ²¹

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Figure 2.

Dendroscope from C. Haber’s 1868 German translation of count Amédée Des Cars’s Treatise on Pruning Forest and Ornamental Trees.

Holding the dendroscope at eye level while moving around the tree, its operator could give instructions to the pruner to achieve the desired tree shape (Figure 3). In this practice, therefore, vision was multiple and perception kinetic. Des Cars suggested four different canopy shapes and canopy/trunk ratios, depending on the tree’s age. Young tree crowns were to be egg-shaped, forming an elongated oval that should measure two-thirds of the tree’s total height. In contrast, an old tree’s crown should have a more rounded outline, and could have a height half that of the whole tree. By cutting the tree into the shape that was projected onto it by the dendroscope, three-dimensional nature was made to conform to the ideal shape on the two-dimensional picture plane. Through the use of the dendroscope, street trees could be “forced” into shape and a series of trees with an identical crown shape could be created.

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Figure 3.

Operation of the dendroscope.

Although the dendroscope was invented to assist in the pruning of forest trees for economic ends (enhancing their vitality and consequently their wood production), the French count had also argued that the tree outlines used in his dendroscope were the most beautiful. The outlines were the shapes that “nature gives the most perfect and most beautiful trees.” ²² In proposing the dendroscope’s use in German urban arboriculture—especially if climbers and pruners lacked training—Beißner was following his French colleagues Jules Nanot and Adolphe Chargueraud. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, these tree experts were promoting the dendroscope’s application to the trees of Paris and street trees in general. ²³ The dendroscope could help to economize arboriculture and standardize tree shapes and urban beautification. While it remains unclear whether pruners in German cities indeed used this device, the fact that it was presented in manuals at the time (in various languages) suggests that it could have found application or at least attention. ²⁴ Strong, thick paper provided the material basis for this new “technique of the observer,” ²⁵ which mediated vision to rationalize pruning in an effort to mass-produce trees with the same canopy shape and size and which could be planted as a series. As Carl Heicke explained in 1896: “It is no longer the single tree that is important, but to the eye it should be completely absorbed in the row that forms the whole.” ²⁶

To further sustain healthy standardized trees, prolong their lives, and protect them against soil compaction and mechanical injury by horses and street vehicles, Berlin’s district Departments of Gardens introduced and promoted tree grates and guards, as well as irrigation and drainage systems, and depicted them in sketches and drawings in their documents (Figure 4).

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Figure 4.

Drawings illustrating irrigation system for street trees, 1914. The irrigation system was implemented in the 1910s along Großbeerenstraße.

Tree Lists

Tree lists replicated on paper the seriality that the early systematic street tree plantings relied upon. Drawn up by Berlin’s district Departments of Gardens, tree lists quantified and qualified newly planted trees as well as existing ones. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was no other official paper representation that proved more important than the list in claiming the relevance of trees in cities. Lists became fundamental tools in the planting, management, and care of street trees.

By the 1880s, Berlin’s municipal government kept lists of street trees planted by private property owners and those planted by the Department of Gardens itself. In 1900, lists for the Berlin district of Tempelhofer Vorstadt (today Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg), for example, counted trees with a caliper above and below nine centimeters, determining the quantity of trees along each street and allocating the number of trees to street names. Notes on the trees’ condition could be added in a separate column (Figure 5). Lists were kept to track planting dates and tree deaths, and could thereby also furnish relevant information and new knowledge about the correlation of site conditions, tree health, and growth. Lists were also made to document trees that were felled due to damage and disease, after 1920 particularly Dutch elm disease. ²⁷

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Figure 5.

Top: Part of list of trees on public streets planted and cared for by citizens, district IV, 1891. Bottom: Part of list of street trees in district IV, 1899 to 1900.

Building upon the German Reich’s 1935 law for nature protection, a 1939 Berlin police order established a list of “nature monuments.” It mostly consisted of old and rare trees along streets, in parks, and in gardens on city territory which were to be protected under the 1935 law. The order prohibited any damage to and removal of the listed trees; the latter required explicit approval by the Department for Nature Protection. The arboreal nature monuments belonged to the city’s natural and cultural heritage. They were characterized either by old age and monumental growth, or by being considered as a curiosity if they were rare ornamental species. They could also be notable for their association with local stories and myths. It was therefore no wonder that this tree list was one of the first to be updated after World War II. Many trees survived the war and became potent symbols of resilience and rebirth in an otherwise devastated, war-ravaged city. Copying and updating the list of tree monuments after the war stressed the continuity of life in the city and of the cultural meanings attributed to particular urban trees. With the help of the list, these meanings and associations were quite literally reproduced and reinscribed into the trees in the postwar years. As such, the so-called “zero hour” (Stunde Null) of the war’s aftermath was not the absolute break with the past and the radical new beginning that many liked to claim at the time. Rather, after Berlin’s division, the lists of arboreal nature monuments were continued in both East and West Berlin. Noteworthy trees were added or marked as “deleted” if they were cut down because of disease, mechanical injuries, or natural death. While the lists were kept by the district Departments of Gardens and published as ordinances, information on the tree monuments was made publicly accessible in the form of newspaper articles. For example, in 1956, the daily newspaper Der Tag (founded in the British sector in 1948) ran a series of articles on West Berlin’s tree monuments stressing their longevity, durability, resistance, and relative permanence. The series author, Bruno Förster, made it clear that although Berlin still had plenty of rubble and some significant reconstruction attempts to show for itself, traces of old Berlin were hard to find unless one assumed a botanical perspective. The city’s arboreal nature monuments belonged to its oldest heritage, and Förster claimed that despite its abundance of concrete and asphalt, Berlin was rich in beautiful old trees. ²⁸

Tree Cards

As much as tree lists could help to systematically implement and record regular series of trees along inner-city streets, and as much as they provided a tool to protect single trees and tree rows, they also remained a relatively inflexible device for the management of trees that changed with the seasons and with age. Handwritten at first and later typewritten, new lists had to be drawn up on paper every year to keep an accurate record of the quantity and quality of street trees in the city.

In the decades after World War II, many German municipal garden departments began to use index cards to register their street trees. The idea to use index cards as more flexible means of documenting street trees and introducing new knowledge about them goes back to the early twentieth century in the United States. There, the secretary and superintendent of the East Orange Shade Tree Commission, William Solotaroff, suggested a system of index cards and maps to record all new trees planted in a city in his widely consulted 1911 handbook, Shade-Trees in Towns and Cities. Solotaroff proposed that further series of index cards could be used to document and keep track of both tree complaints and the daily work conducted by each gang of climbers and pruners (Figure 6). ²⁹ A few years later, in 1915, landscape architect Laurie D. Cox adapted Solotaroff’s survey recommendations to the requirements of New York City, where he was commissioned to produce the first comprehensive tree survey. Cox listed all of one block’s trees on a single card, recording their location, species, diameter, and condition (whether older or newly planted). Information on whether trees were equipped with guards, grates, and stakes was added (Figure 7). ³⁰ Despite good intentions, following up on comprehensive tree surveys in each New York City borough proved challenging over the years. Nonetheless, the tree cards were used, even if not always with the necessary rigor.

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Figure 6.

Index cards suggested by William Solotaroff for the record of planted trees, tree complaints, and daily tree work reports.

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Figure 7.

Laurie D. Cox, proposal for an index card record system of street trees in New York City, 1915.

Decades later in East Berlin, the Pankow district Department of Gardens developed an index card for a street tree register. Once approved by the city’s Department of Gardens, the Pankow office began counting and surveying street trees in the late 1960s. But given the lack of available labor, progress was slow. When the first round of work was finally completed in 1972—by a student in a term paper—it revealed that the recorded number of trees in the district was wrong and had to be adjusted. Not 17,000, but only 15,774, trees lined district streets. The survey’s upkeep was uncertain, and the following annual reports failed to mention any updates. ³¹

A more promising and successful attempt at a comprehensive street tree survey was undertaken in Dresden during the same years. At a time when both East and West German cities struggled to keep adequate records of their street trees—and for the most part were losing more trees than they were planting—Dresden’s comprehensive card and map system was an exception. In the early 1970s, the city counted around 36,000 street trees and was home to the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) only academic landscape architecture program.

To protect the city’s trees and promote its afforestation, East German landscape architect Siegfried Sommer and his students at the Technical University Dresden developed a system for a citywide street tree survey, using city maps and edge-notched cards. The latter was a paper technology originally invented at the beginning of the twentieth century and widely used from the 1940s to the 1960s by scientists, engineers, and administrators in the United States and Europe (Figures 8 and 9). ³² The information on the edge-notched cards recorded various data about the street trees: their species, age and life expectancy, location, and the formation/type of planting (standalone, row, allée, mix of diverse species). The accompanying maps at the scale of 1:5,000 were used to indicate survey units—trees of the same species or cultivars that stood along a street or on a plaza or median. The maps also indicated the respective trees’ life expectancy through hachures drawn along streets. Besides the use of punched holes to register specifics of the trees’ qualities, the cards were also number-coded, corresponding to a particular numbered location on the city maps. As with any edge-notched cards, Dresden’s mechanical card sorting system facilitated both the organization and analysis of a large amount of information. Data were extracted from the cards by passing one or more slim needles through selected holes in a group of cards. By lifting the needles, the cards that were notched in the hole positions where the needles were inserted would be left behind while the rest of the cards were lifted up by the needles. This procedure facilitated the search for particular tree data and eliminated the time-consuming job of refiling cards in any exact order.

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Figure 8.

Documentation of Dresden’s street trees on edge-notched cards and in city maps.

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Figure 9.

Edge-notched cards for the documentation and management of Dresden’s street trees, 1970s.

Sommer had a long-standing interest in roadside trees. Having undertaken an extensive research project on their impact on adjacent vegetation at Berlin’s Humboldt University, and researching tree planting and care in urban environments, he had proposed card systems to survey street trees and their condition already in the years before. In the early 1970s, he finally found a willing partner in this endeavor in Dresden’s municipal government. ³³ The government’s objective was to establish a paper database and documentation system which could be updated easily and which provided a basis for an ecological-aesthetic tree-planting concept—that is, a citywide street tree-planting plan that responded to both aesthetic design criteria and environmental conditions. Building on the survey work, in the second half of the 1970s, students from the Technical University did indeed draw up tree-planting concepts for the city. ³⁴ East German landscape architects had introduced the idea of comprehensive tree-planting concepts in the 1950s and 1960s to provide a planning tool for green urban infrastructure. Based upon the geographical classification of soils and landscape types, as well as the climatological and aesthetic functions provided by different tree species, tree-planting concepts were drawn up for both new and existing cities, and for many new residential neighborhoods featuring mass housing. ³⁵

Dresden’s street tree work in the 1970s was spurred by the socialist state’s urge to connect research and practice, and to systematize and industrialize work processes. The edge-notched cards, together with the set of city maps, provided a system for the surveillance, management, and maintenance of one of the most important non-human natural elements in the city: street trees. But the use of edge-notched cards for surveillance purposes had been approved in the GDR since the 1960s, albeit in a different context. Since 1965, the GDR’s Ministry of National Security had used a larger version of edge-notched cards for personal registers, for example, to document informal collaborators. With regard to trees, however, Dresden’s 1970s street tree survey marked both a high point and a turning point in the use of paper for the management and control of street trees. It was before cities in the East and West began managing their trees with the help of computers. Analog cartographic and indexing systems like Dresden’s edge-notched cards and maps anticipated the flexibility that was ultimately provided by computers and geographic information systems (GIS).

In West Berlin, it took until the late 1970s for the Department of Gardens to undertake a comprehensive street tree survey that used index cards as one type of paper record. The waste of street trees, which had begun to suffer due to increased pollution and had also been removed for large infrastructure projects in the 1960s, led to attempts for new street tree documentation. Reacting to citizen protests against the lack of street tree care, in 1979 the urban government initiated an aerial infrared survey to assess urban tree damage. Aerial infrared photography quickly evolved into a method that was hailed as facilitating the systematic inventory, analysis, management, and planning of street trees. West Berlin’s first systematic street tree inventory on the ground was supported by the data gathered from these aerial photographs. Trees were marked and numbered on cadastral city maps and listed on index cards. Information on species, age and vitality, trunk circumference, canopy diameter, height, root space, and any potential causes of damage were to be inserted on the card so that the information could be easily updated and ultimately fed into a computer system. ³⁶

One of the advantages of the comprehensive and synoptic vision that aerial infrared surveys offered was that it allowed for the assessment of the spatial and temporal relationship and development of tree damage and disease. The aerial surveys could make visible the spatial extent, or patterns, of tree damage and disease. At a time when remote sensing and GIS were still in their infancy and only suitably applied on regional scales, aerial infrared photography—if undertaken at regular intervals—proved to be a practical means of tracking the dynamic of both urban development and the seasonal and life cycles of street trees. To make the information in aerial infrared photographs useful, it not only had to be interpreted, but it also consequently had to be represented in a user-friendly format that could be updated easily. Inserting data on index cards that could be ordered and reordered according to different criteria, and which could be updated over time, provided a more flexible way of coming to terms with changes in trees’ life forces and life cycles than previous lists.

Tree Maps

Besides providing data for the index cards, West Berlin’s 1979 aerial infrared survey also offered a basis for the development of a prototypical street tree map for the documentation of tree locations and conditions that could be adjusted over time. The task fell to graduate student Gottfried Borys, advised by Bernd Meissner at the Freie Universität and Gerhard Pöhlmann at the Technische Fachhochschule. Borys developed a prototypical street tree map at a 1:2,000 scale as part of his 1982 diploma thesis. Produced before the widespread use of GIS, the street tree map was intended to provide a planning tool that could be adjusted and updated as trees and urban development changed over the years. ³⁷

Borys achieved the straightforward adaptability of his map by selecting specific cartographic production methods and representational techniques. For example, he chose easily convertible hachures for particularly changeable conditions, such as the degree of vitality and information on various types of tree damage. The map spatialized information gathered from aerial infrared photographs and terrestrial analysis available in the tables of Berlin’s street tree inventory. It included data on tree species, age and vitality, trunk damage, soil type and permeability, and causes of damage. Borys’s prototypical street tree map was never utilized in West Berlin’s street tree management, and, of course, it cannot compete with today’s GIS. But the cartographic symbols, colors, and methods Borys devised for the map’s production and printing took time into account as a factor of change in the plant world. It was a first cartographic response to the more rapid changes of urban plant life. ³⁸

Adding several layers of data and using carefully selected cartographic production methods and representational techniques for increased flexibility, Borys had based his map on Berlin’s cadastral survey maps at a 1:1,000 scale that included the location of individual tree trunks. Some Berlin survey maps had included street trees since the late nineteenth century. Cartographer Julius Straube’s maps were a case in point. By plotting the location of street trees in the 1880s, Straube turned them into recognizable elements in the urban fabric. In his publishing house’s maps, street trees appeared as street furniture and were listed in the legend alongside the symbols for other elements found in late-nineteenth-century streets: monuments, water pumps, telegraph poles, lamps, advertising columns, boundary stones, water wells, and hydrants (Figure 10). Thus, while Straube had made street trees visible in the first place by making them another layer in the increasingly congested urban infrastructure below and above ground, the plotted trees appeared as static elements, like the lifeless street furniture that he surveyed.

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Figure 10.

Julius Straube, plan of Berlin, 1:14,500, 1882. Details showing Pariser Platz and trees along Unter den Linden, and legend.

At the time of Straube’s comprehensive Berlin survey and into the early twentieth century, officials in the district Departments of Gardens also used maps drawn and measured by hand. They marked new and existing tree locations along individual streets under study, emphasized their regular distribution along the curbs, and indicated trees that were to be removed. Since then, however, the need to react quickly and flexibly to changes in the urban fabric and its trees led initially to attempts like Borys’s, and ultimately to today’s digital tree maps. Used by municipal governments and not-for-profit organizations, the digital maps vary in the type of information they offer the public and in whether or not they engage citizens in crowdsourcing activities. Berlin’s digital street tree data rely on the work and input of the city’s arborists and tree managers. Citizens do not participate in collecting data for the city’s street tree inventory, but they have access to data that can be filtered by location, species, planting date, age, canopy diameter, trunk diameter, and height. ³⁹ If, in 1970s Dresden, edge-notched cards were still used as a medium that enabled mechanical searches for all trees of one species, age range, or diameter, today digital filters do the job in a few seconds and make this information available to anyone with computer access.

Tree Charts

Paper documents were central for governing and managing the city’s trees, but they were also a means by which residents contested the municipal government of trees. Paper was both an instrument for the representation and reproduction of governments, and for building opposition against those governments. ⁴⁰ When in the 1970s concerned West Berlin citizens protested the municipal government’s inadequate street tree care, ultimately sparking a more flexible documentation system and a more rigorous register of street trees, they used recycled paper as the communication material. The special materiality of recycled paper contributed to the meaning of the tree activists’ documents. It stressed the activists’ environmentalist agenda, emphasizing the value of trees in more ways than one. Besides their climatological, aesthetic, and health functions, trees were also a valuable resource for wood and paper.

Organized in a variety of citizen initiatives including the not-for-profit Association for the Protection of Berlin Trees (Gemeinschaft für den Schutz des Berliner Baumbestandes e.V.), citizens printed their newsletters and xeroxed leaflets and pamphlets on recycled paper. As a means and medium of “grassroots creativity” and activism, recycled paper was employed not only to draw attention to endangered trees but also to distribute the latest scientific findings related to tree health and care. Indeed, the Association for the Protection of Berlin Trees declared it its mission to keep an eye on urban tree care and maintenance activities conducted by the district Departments of Gardens. Such citizen groups did not use paper like the municipal government—that is, to draw up efficient lists that rationalized and standardized tree planting and care—but rather to express and reintroduce passion when arguing on behalf of trees in the city. ⁴¹ Recycled paper’s material roughness enforced the role of affect in the activists’ environmentalist agenda, as did the use of cartoons and drawings in their communications.

The xeroxed documentation on recycled paper of the association’s first “Tree Hearing,” organized along with other organizations after the long and snowy winter of 1978/79 to begin a campaign against the use of de-icing salt, included a cartoon. It showed a street tree suffering almost all of the possible afflictions in an urban environment, including road salt, air pollution, bad pruning, dog urine, and its trunk being used as a notice board (Figure 11). The Association for the Protection of Berlin Trees had protested the destruction of trees and the lack of comprehensive tree surveys from its inception in the early 1970s. ⁴² The campaign against de-icing salt further pressured the West Berlin city government to rethink its winter snow policies and ultimately contributed to the prohibition of de-icing salt on all sidewalks in 1978 and on most roadways the following year. ⁴³

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Figure 11.

Xeroxed documentation on recycled paper of the first “Tree Hearing” organized by various West Berlin citizen groups to protest the lack of street tree care by the urban government, 1979.

Some years later, after the fall of the Wall, the newsletters of various environmental opposition groups like Baumschutz and Berliner Luftzeitung encouraged citizens to do their part by reporting any damage and maltreatment of trees, using a paper form that was to be sent to the respective district Department of Gardens (Figure 12). ⁴⁴ Again printed on recycled paper, the form was designed in the style of a medical chart for trees. It included an abstract image of a tree that could be marked up to indicate the location of any inflicted damage. Although the tree was objectified, it also appeared humanized: a patient who needed proper care and treatment. By marking up the abstract image of the tree, citizens individualized and specified the tree.

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Figure 12.

Report sheet for street tree damage, 1995.

This democratic practice, promoted in the 1990s, stands in contrast to the use of the dendroscope almost one hundred years earlier, which was intended to turn individual trees into “bureaucratic trees” with abstract, idealized shapes. With their creative, passionate, and vehement arguments for the protection of street trees, grassroots street tree activism and citizen groups like the Association for the Protection of Berlin Trees were finally successful in drawing the attention of the urban government to the poor condition of trees in the city and effecting more street tree care.

Wood and Paper

If street trees were ordered and managed with the help of paper and its various formats, on occasion the trees themselves delivered the raw material for paper production. Although the use of street tree lumber as firewood was far more common in Berlin at various moments throughout the twentieth century—especially in times of crises during and after the world wars—certain species like the fast-growing poplar were particularly useful not only in the production of lumber but also of pulp and paper. ⁴⁵

After World War II, efforts were undertaken in all occupied zones to increase lumber production inside and outside of existing forests, especially through the cultivation of poplars. After the division of Germany, poplar cultivation played a particularly important role in East Germany. In the 1950s, the GDR initiated a poplar cultivation program as part of its five-year plan that included the planting of poplars along streets and on leftover areas in the bombed-out parts of East Berlin. By planting thirty-five million poplars in and outside of forests, the state aimed to replenish its wood supply that had been depleted during and immediately after the war, when the GDR had to deliver much of its timber as reparations to the Soviet Union. ⁴⁶ In addition, the state sought to become self-sufficient in its production of pulp and paper, and therefore independent from timber imports. Given poplars’ high percentage of cellulose, which surpasses even that of European spruce, the GDR’s poplar cultivation program was intended to save the timber of spruce, pine, and beech for construction purposes while using poplar for pulp and paper production. ⁴⁷ The reality, however, was somewhat different. Less poplars than initially intended were planted, and less poplar wood was used for this purpose.

Nevertheless, the objective of many poplar plantings in postwar East Berlin was to contribute to the GDR’s supply of pulp and paper, and wood. ⁴⁸ Poplar plantings were part of East Berlin’s so-called wild grass program (Wildgrasprogramm / Wildrasenprogramm), begun in the winter of 1961 to improve the visual appearance of the war-ravaged inner city, bind dust, and prevent rubble areas from becoming sources of contagion. Rubble areas were cleared, covered with up to ten centimeters of topsoil, treated with herbicide, and then seeded with a drought-resistant grass mixture that had been developed especially for this purpose. Subsequently, many rubble areas were planted with fast-growing poplars. The trees circumscribed the block or covered it entirely. Given the special urgency of the representational center’s reconstruction, the wild grass campaign and its supporting poplar plantings played a particularly important role in this part of the city. ⁴⁹

Already before the wild grass program was launched in East Berlin, the GDR and its capital had begun to institute various legislative measures that declared street trees and other roadside trees merchantable wood that could yield considerable profit. Wood had become so scarce that in East Berlin in June 1951, the magistrate ordered the district Departments of Gardens to report their available lumber quantities; in May 1952, it was ordered that all scrap wood from workshops, woodshops, building sites, and street, garden, and park maintenance activities were to be centrally collected so that it could be sold and reused. While workshops were allowed to reuse the wood for their own purposes, under no circumstances were workers allowed to take it. ⁵⁰

In a directive of March 19, 1953, the East German government finally made the more general announcement that wood from street trees was a valuable resource that had yet to be recognized as such. Plans for the maintenance and use of street and roadside trees were to be prepared each year and confirmed by the Ministry of Forestry and Agriculture. Contracts for the respective sales quantities from street and roadside trees were to be arranged with the local state forestry operations. Decades later in 1981, the GDR’s new tree ordinance created a mandate for cities and citizens to protect their trees, while assuring maximum profit for the state if trees did have to be felled—for example, on the occasion of new construction projects. Cities were required to offer any lumber they accrued to the state forestry units for purchase. Likewise, East Berlin’s own tree ordinance of the same year required that lumber accrued by Berlin’s district offices through tree removal also had to be offered first to state forestry units for purchase. ⁵¹ More than in West Berlin, where dead trees and tree debris were especially used in composting to produce mulch, East Berlin’s urban trees were considered a material resource, as lumber and ultimately even as paper, that was to be saved and not wasted.

Today, the park departments of many major cities recycle their street tree debris as wood and mulch, and they use GIS and digital maps to record and document their street trees. The trees are georeferenced on digital city maps, and information on the species, age, height, planting date, caliper, crown width, and location is often just a mouse click away. In cities like Berlin, urban foresters and arborists use a device equipped with a global positioning system in the field to record these characteristics, as well as tree damage and maintenance instructions. The data flow afforded by these new technologies has increased the flexibility and speed with which urban trees can be surveyed and managed.

Yet, the increasingly rational, efficient, and paperless management techniques that are helping cities like Berlin and New York City to increase their canopy cover can be traced back to the paper documents that facilitated the implementation of the first systematic street tree plantings in European and American cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Paper was a fundamental medium and method to introduce, record, and manage street trees. In fact, the paper documents used to record tree data in numbers, words, and drawings have in many cases outlasted the surveyed trees, illustrating paper’s durability in capturing abstract information and data. That said, a close look at the paper formats and graphic representations employed for recording tree data and the urban tree canopy also reveals the struggle to come to terms with the less tangible, or even inherently ephemeral, characteristics of urban trees.

Paper documents played an important role in negotiating the tension between the desire to produce a predictable, controllable, and durable “bureaucratic” or “normal tree” that co-produced the city, and the attempt to save the vulnerable and unpredictable “real tree” that exhibited individuality, responded to its environment, and elicited affect. As much as the evolution of paper formats to try and capture trees’ malleability has contributed to the evolution of paperless tree inventories and management systems—tools which have helped to boost street tree numbers in many cities in recent decades—it was paper’s durability that helped trees grow firm roots in cities in the first place.