The Singing Trees
International Children’s Mural Project

After completing a school mural project, a second grader named Meredith asked artist Laurie Marshall, “What if the whole world made a painting together?”

Marshall decided to start with the children, and two years later she launched a pilot project with the Rappahannock County (VA) schools. Roughly 1,000 students, aged 3 to 18, helped make the first “Singing Tree” (an elm) in spring 2001, funded by a grant from the Headwaters Foundation.

Young people under the age of 12 made leaves for the tree, with a symbol of something they care about or a self-portrait. Middle school students created self-portraits for the trunk, and high school students worked on sections of the globe. Anyone having lost an immediate family member was invited to create a star.

The project takes its name from Kate Seredy’s book The Singing Tree, in which World War I soldiers crawl for hours through darkness to escape the enemy. Throughout the long night they come across no evidence of life—not a person, house, rabbit, squirrel, bird, tree, or bush—everything has been destroyed by war. When dawn comes, however, they see that one tree is still alive. Hundreds of birds from miles around who don't normally come together, were in the tree, singing.

After Marshall relocated to Pittsburgh, high school students there—from inner-city Peabody High and suburban Mt. Lebanon High—created four more Singing Trees: the apple, linden, maple, and ginkgo. Roughly 4,000 students, including young people from Peru, Sierra Leone, and Germany, helped with the paintings.

The Singing Trees have been exhibited at the 2001 graduation of Rappahannock County High School, as well as Pittsburgh’s Peabody and Mt. Lebanon High Schools. They also were shown at the 2002 Three Rivers Arts Festival of Pittsburgh and at the U.S. Botanic Gardens in Washington, DC as part of a commemoration ceremony on September 11th, 2002.

See the Singing Trees website, designed by Kristoffer Smith at the age of 18, for more photos and information, including instructions for teachers. A half -hour documentary about the project, started by Robert Morris University student Ken Presutti when he was 18 and finished just now at 20, is also available on the website. The documentary captures the Singing Tree's spirit of creativity and connectedness.

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