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Tree avenues

 

The French term ‘allée’ is used in many parts of Europe when referring to tree-lined ‘ways of passage’ in parks and gardens, in towns or in the country. In the context of landscapes, ‘avenue’ has the same meaning in English. ‘Avenues’ (or ‘tree avenues’) are thus ‘ways of passage’—paths, streets, and roads, but also canals—lined with rows of regularly spaced trees.

Avenues (in this sense) constitute an important cultural, natural, and landscape heritage in France, Europe, and beyond.

To know more about tree avenues, go to the "Quiz" and to the "Tree avenues and road safety" pages.

 

Our objectives

 

To foster knowledge about  the cultural, natural, and landscape heritage that avenues represent  Through information and education, to raise the awareness of the general public and professionals about the values of avenues  To showcase the heritage of tree avenues and associated best practice  To promote the economic activities and jobs avenues create  To protect and renew existing avenues, and to develop new ones  To support initiatives and protagonists helping to preserve tree avenues

Who are we?

 

We are avenue lovers, determined to showcase this valuable heritage and convinced it is an asset for all of us. The board is made up of: Eric Mutschler, chair; Isabelle Kauffmann, secretary; Pierre Courbet, treasurer; Pierre Collin ; Qing Liu ; and Danièle Saget. Chantal Pradines, expert on avenues in France and in Europe, is executive director.

 

Our actions

ALLÉES-AVENUES /allées d'avenir/ is active at the local, national and international levels. Its actions are of an artistic, a technical and a scientific nature.

Three main actions :

Other important actionsderive from these main actiont :

They have already supported us in 2024:

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Performance artistique à Trampot filmée par Thierry Passerat (Vimeo).

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For the launch of the Artistic Observatory of the ash tree avenue in Trampot, we welcomed the French visual artist Constance Fulda. Fascinated by trees, she placed her Japanese papers - an extremely light and durable paper that does not turn yellow with time - on the bark to capture the intimate history of the ash trees bordering the RD 427. The result is puzzling: each tree revealed a kind of constellation, a complex network of "cores" and filaments resembling a strange mycelium.

This is the first time Constance Fulda has made such a series of rubbings in an avenue. Usually, she works on single trees such as the huge banyan tree of Thrissur, India, or the millennia-old cedar of Yakushima Island, Japan.

The audience received a miniature rubbing and a copy of an unpublished handwritten text offered by poet Christian Bobin.

Vosges Television (ViàVosges) aired a report available here.

Constance Fulda will return to continue her work until each tree has its "portrait".

 

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The Observatory could be launched thanks to our donors, in particular

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Watch the short film by Thierry Passerat

The RD 427 avenue, a 3.3 km long ash tree avenue, is documented at least as of the early 19th century and was replanted in the 1950s. The County road is running through the village of Trampot (Vosges), close to Joan of Arc's birhtplace Domrémy la Pucelle.

It is a very special avenue : due to be felled in 2005, it lead to investigating avenue policies in Europe and drafting of a white book about tree avenues (Road infrastructures - Tree avenues in the landscape) that was published by the Council of Europe as part of the work around the European landscape convention. To ensure its preservation, a bill was drafted and a legal protection of tree avenues in general was eventually integrated into the French environmental code in 2016.

The ash tree avenue is under the pressure of Chalara fraxinea, a fungus causing ash dieback. 24 trees were felled in 2019, out of 271. Some others were felled in 2022 and 2023. But being situated in an open landscape, the trees still resist quite well. The preservation of this avenue is interesting to monitor the resistance to ash dieback. It is also important for the rich biodiversity associated with ash trees and as a corridor for bats linking the village to the forest.

In 2023, a row of young maples was planted along a path close to the road, on its westward section, to anticipate the future removal of trees.

The dynamics of the evolution of the trees and the avenue serves as a background for an artistic landscape observatory: we invite artists to follow this evolution over the years. The artworks produced will eventually showcase the avenue, for the benefit  of the village of Trampot.

In 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, we invited Constance Fulda, Ridha Dhib, Julie Ory. In 2024, the acoustic ensemble Angeli Primitivi, the French sculptor José Le Piez and the American photographer Wayne Gudmundson added their own contributions. Click on the years for more details.

At the end of the symposium organized in 2018, we exchanged thoughts about the initiative called “Tree Avenues - Horizon 2030”, and we retained three keywords:

link, knowledge, events.

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Link

By their very nature, tree avenues constitute a physical link between two points. They trace routes, even valued touristic routes such as the German Deutsche Alleenstraße, and precious ecological corridors.

Tree avenues create temporal links: today’s tree-lined streets and roads take us back to the “French-style” garden of the 17th century; memorial avenues in Australia or Canada etc. take us back to WWI. 

Tree avenues form symbolic links: the avenue planted in 2014 on both sides of the German-Polish border in a program called “Make avenues – not borders” is an example. Symbolic links are doubled with human links. And these effortlessly transcend geographical distances.

This makes avenues perfect carriers of the values of cohesion and peace. “Horizon 2030” we are aiming at is an horizon with more avenues, and qualitative avenues, i.e. more physical links, more symbolic links, more human links.

Possible actions: Planting avenues - Creating or managing touristic routes -Twinning avenues and linking people together

Knowledge

Knowledge is essential if we want to preserve avenues in the long term.

We need precise know-how in terms of management to counter the disappearance of trees and avenues.

We need to know where we can find our avenues, we need to be able to recognize them when only a few trees are left, in order to be able to acknowledge their value, to prevent their disappearance, or to replant them.

We need to know the characteristics of tree avenues in general and of each avenue in particular to reconcile the technical imperatives of trees and roads with their historical / cultural interest, their environmental interest, and their social interest (as is required under the terms of article L350-3 of the French Environmental code).

Breaking down divisions, sharing knowledge between different kinds of stakeholders—the man in the street, elected officials, and professionals—and between different kinds of professionals—experts in arboriculture, biologists, landscapers, developers, road managers etc—, and building together is crucial for quality projects and to avoid conflicts.

Necessary actions: Inventories and studies - Sharing knowledge - Crossing disciplines & building together

Events

Events are absolutely necessary to fight against attrition of memory, due to things being forgotten or becoming banal, and to keep heritage alive and visible in the community.

The initiative

The participants in the conference listed 58 actions they have already undertaken or would be interested in taking part in. They could all be related to one of the key-words “link”, “knowledge”, “events”

Events: Dynamic events (circulating in avenues) - Static events (artistic) - Linking events to each other



The exhibition "Tree avenues - from war to peace" is available for display. It has both French and English text.

PRESENTATION

 

DESCRIPTION

 

 

In November 2018, we invited Mathieu Flammarion to follow the international symposium we had been organizing. Mathieu Flammarion is an author and illustrator, a graduate from Institut Saint-Luc Art school in Brussels. He produces comics and illustrative works but also paintings which have been exhibited in Paris, Berlin and New-York. We had asked him to be with us at the symposium so as to find the matter of his story, but also to experience the atmosphere and meet with the participants.

Mathieu is actually working on a graphic novel inspired by the felling, in 2013, of part of the memorial avenue of Montafia (Italy), by the project of the Vimy Oaks Legacy, which repatriated oak saplings from Canada to their original territory of Vimy Ridge, and by the Australian avenues of honour. It will deliver this history to a new audience. A kind of “making of” supplement will round it off and present the symposium in itself as well as Mathieu’s work.

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(c) M.Flammarion

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