Sonja Dümpelmann is associate professor of landscape architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and author or editor/co-editor of several books, including the 2015 John Brinkerhoff Jackson Book Prize–winner Flights of Imagination: Aviation, Landscape, Design.
Fascinating and well-illustrated . . . a compelling narrative . . . D mpelmann brings an accessible writing style and admirable curiosity . . . authoritative and original . . . she extends the boundaries of landscape history . . . Seeing Trees will serve as an important reference point for urban and landscape history in the future. --Mark Favermann, Arts Fuse Seeing Trees has won the 2019 John Brinckerhoff Jackson prize, sponsored by the Foundation for Landscape Studies In this imaginative and deeply researched work, Sonja D mpelmann truly helps us to 'see trees' in the careful chronologies she develops and the political messages that these trees represented within their times and places. --Keith Morgan, Boston University In Seeing Trees the distinguished scholar Sonja D mpelmann employs her linguistic ability, knowledge, and imaginative use of the archival resources in both Berlin and New York to extend the boundaries of landscape history. --Kenneth Helphand, University of Oregon, author of Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime Sonja D mpelmann distills a rich and textured history of street trees--the people involved, technical approaches employed, and the way street trees served as both a polemic and as a point of unification for people. --Susan Herrington, author of Landscape Theory in Design This meticulously researched and beautifully illustrated book chronicles the multifaceted identities of trees--as food, fuel, shelter, and defense--and offers us new ways of reading social history into the natural world. --Jennifer S. Light, Massachusetts Institute of Technology A signal contribution to the history of landscape design and city planning. Writing with narrative verve, Sonja D mpelmann turns rigorous scholarship into a fascinating story of time and place for both the academic and general reader. --Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, President, Foundation for Landscape Studies