"Trees" by Terry Allen (Stuart Collection, UCSD)

The story

When UC San Diego razed a section of its eucalyptus groves to make room for concrete campus expansion, artist Terry Allen salvaged three of the felled trees, sheathed their trunks entirely in lead, and put them back up. Two stand directly inside a living eucalyptus grove between Geisel Library and the Faculty Club—looking from twenty yards away like normal trees until you get close enough to see that they don't sway in the wind and their bark is dull gray metal.

Two of the lead-sheathed trunks hide internal speakers, but they don't run on an obvious background loop. Allen engineered them with long, unpredictable stretches of dead silence. You can sit on the grass beneath them for twenty minutes hearing nothing but wind in the living branches above, and just when you assume the sound system is broken, a tree will suddenly begin broadcasting a story, a poem read by Allen's young son, or a song written specifically for the piece by David Byrne.

Because lead is soft, generations of students have used keys and pocket change to scratch initials, dates, and secret notes straight into the metallic bark. Rather than being buffed out, the lead trunks have turned into a silver-gray archive of campus history—a communal text community members call the "Enchanted Forest."