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Arboreal Political Bodies: From Liberty Trees to the European Tree of the Year

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  • Sanja Puljar D'Alessio
Sanja Puljar D'Alessio
University of Rijeka
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3197/whppp.63876246815940

Published 2026-08-04

Keywords

  • Arboreal Political Body,
  • Liberty Trees,
  • European Tree of the Year,
  • Plant Politics,
  • Human–Arboreal Relations

How to Cite

Puljar D’Alessio, Sanja. 2026. “Arboreal Political Bodies: From Liberty Trees to the European Tree of the Year”. Plant Perspectives, August, 1-25. https://doi.org/10.3197/whppp.63876246815940.

Copyright (c) 2026 Sanja Puljar D'Alessio

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Trees can become political actors within communal life. This article introduces the concept of the ‘arboreal political body’ to explain how certain trees acquire political significance through interactions with communities, spatial contexts and narratives. Drawing on the historical tradition of liberty trees and contemporary examples from the European Tree of the Year contest, the article identifies five analytical dimensions through which trees operate as political entities: living materiality, spatial agency, communal embeddedness, narrative identity and symbolic condensation. These dimensions cluster into three interrelated registers of arboreal political existence: the living material body, the narrative body and the symbolic body. The framework is developed through an ethnographic case study of the Rab holm oak in Croatia. The analysis shows how trees function as nodes where ecological life, collective memory and political meanings converge, revealing vegetal life as an active participant in the organisation of political and communal worlds.

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