This paper examines how trees mediate relationships with the past through two arboreal interventions in Brașov. The first records collective political history: after Brașov was renamed Orașul Stalin (Stalin City) in 1950, fir trees were planted on Mount Tâmpa to spell “STALIN.” After the city recovered its name in 1960, traces remained legible for decades. The second one, meant to help heal private grief, is the Plantați în amintire (Planted in Memory) project, which started in November 2022, and involved planting different trees (oaks, ginkgos) to commemorate loved ones. Each planted tree was given a QR code, providing access to the story of the person in whose memory the tree was planted. I approach the two projects through plant humanities and plant ethics, asking what psychological, political, and cultural mechanisms allow plants to be entrusted with human memory. The two cases present contrasting practices of remembrance: one imposes an ideological name on the landscape and collective history, while the other gives personal loss a shared, material form. Yet both rely on an anthropocentric view of trees as instruments that extend human memory and give it vegetal expression. Trees, however, are not passive objects; they are living beings that carry human meanings forward and will likely outlive them. By bringing arboreal time into contact with political history and personal remembrance, these sites reveal the symbolic power and cultural value of trees, as well as the ethical tensions involved in treating more-than-human beings as instruments for preserving human pasts.

Authors:
Ioana Clara Enescu, Transilvania University of Brasov, Romania

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Ioana Clara Enescu is a lecturer assistant at the Faculty of Letters, Transilvania University of Brașov, Romania. She also serves as a copyeditor for Ecokritike, an international peer-reviewed journal in the field of environmental humanities.

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