URBAN TREES ARE SMILING
In the summer of 2026, with a small grant from Evanston’s Love Your Block program, a brigade of family and friends fanned out to label hundreds of trees across the city. Using custom stencils for the city’s 20 most common species and this map of its 35,000 street trees, we got to work tagging as many trees as we could.
Want to see tree rings on your block or in your city? Get in touch!
Why tree rings?
When was the last time you stopped to look up at a tree—or teach a child its name? Most of us have some degree of ‘plant blindness,’ the natural bias that makes people gush over a Labrador retriever but walk past a flowering catalpa. And so every day city dwellers of all ages miss an opportunity to connect with their spectacular urban forest.
We want to change that. Tree rings are a simple, beautiful, and low-cost technique for bringing parkway trees to people’s attention. The elegantly arching names painted on sidewalks are designed to spark delight and turn every walk through your neighborhood into a stroll through a botanic garden.
