Plant Curator was lucky enough to see Yoko Ono perform (music) at the Royal Festival Hall c.2005. She was a petit, yapping, avant-garde wonder, shiningly entertaining at that. She currently has a major retrospective of her career that spans five decades at Guggenheim Bilbao. It shows just how much she has achieved. She is her own woman, creating tirelessly in her own style, reiterating unarguable messages of peace and love. There is so very much to admire about her. Plant Curator today, is particularly drawn to her wishing trees and all that they represent.
There are no words to describe the power of trees, yet if you write a few of them down, on a little card and attach it to a branch, then you intuitively understand what they can do for you. If this happens collectively, with hundreds of other people, the power and energy of unified hope and thought, channelling through this plant is rather moving. The tree holds all that together for us and works its own special kind of plant magic.
Since the 1990s the Wish Tree has played a significant part in many of Yoko Ono’s exhibitions. She had one installed in the Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and another in Washington, DC at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, plus various other art exhibits. She also encourages others to create their own Wish Tree as a place to write their own personal messages for peace. When the trees are full she collects all the wishes together and sends them to the Imagine Peace Tower in Reykjavik, Iceland. She now has over a million there – imagine that.
Using trees in this way, as conduits, is not new and in different formats is a universal, spiritual, ancient practice, but Yoko Ono is keeping one valuable branch of it going for us.
