Branching Out

Adrina Bardekjian (PhD ’15) didn’t start out to be a champion tree hugger. Her first love was the arts. Creative writing. Painting. Photography. Film. Theatre.

But in 2001, as she was nearing the end of her undergraduate degree at Concordia University, she got the chance to go to a tree-planting camp in northern Ontario. Trees captured her and never let go.

That passion led her into a master of forest conservation at the University of Toronto and then to several years of consulting work with non-governmental organizations related to forestry. But something didn’t feel right. She could see disparities in how people doing different types of work were treated.

“I was noticing the need for a bridge or language to start talking about some of the marginalized stories I was seeing,” she says on a Zoom call. She wanted to learn how to share those stories.

Finally, she found York’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. Inspired by the breadth of the faculty’s expertise, she enrolled in the doctorate program. It was a revelation.

“There were people in my cohort that were looking at art. There were people looking at urban festivals and how that influenced environmental change. York was this very interesting, interdisciplinary world,” she says, adding, “I’m so grateful to the university for extending my mind in those directions.”

Today, Bardekjian is an urban forestry researcher who is passionate about combining storytelling and the creative arts with science. An adjunct professor of forestry at U of T’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, she is also director of engagement and research at Tree Canada, a national non-profit dedicated to planting and nurturing trees in both rural and urban spaces. Plus, she continues creative writing and landscape photography.

Some of her tales are straightforward. In 2014, she spent eight and a half hours on National Tree Day hugging a crabapple tree in Montreal’s Mount Royal Park. The goal was to draw attention to urban forests and parks. But it was also to break a world record.

Representatives for both Guinness World Records and Tree Canada took notes and recorded the event, verifying Bardekjian’s record for the longest hugging of a tree. And while she recently found out that the paperwork cataloguing the feat has been lost, she knows of no one who has out-hugged her since.

Through Tree Canada, Bardekjian strives to understand the less literal ways people view trees, too. Caring for the urban forest is not only about planting trees and making sure they thrive. Trees carry meaning and emotional freight.

“I love people,” she says. “I love doing forest walks and I love being in the forest. But in terms of my work and academic inquiry, it’s the story of spaces and the mix between the relationship between people and nature that really interests me.”

For people of some cultural backgrounds, certain trees are places of convening and therefore the keys to making political decisions, Bardekjian says. For others, trees are fantastical creatures, perhaps even magical, like the hawthorn trees that Irish legend says are beloved by faeries. Some see trees as aesthetically pleasing, or as habitat for wildlife, or as purifiers of air or as carbon reservoirs.

“I think trees have always been looked at in multiple ways,” Bardekjian says. “It just depends on your entry point into the conversation.”

But urban forests hold social and political implications, too. That’s why, along with her colleague Liza Paqueo, an urban ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service international programs, Bardekjian has developed the innovative YouTube discussion series Where Women Choose to Walk: Paths to Improving Cities and Nature. The series looks at women’s experiences of natural resources in urban settings across the world. It’s a way to talk not just of trees, but also issues such as social and environmental justice, diversity, motherhood and even creative inspiration. The tree provides a canopy broad enough for all. ■