The Forest and the Trees: A conversation with TreeGirl
When people ask Julianne Skai Arbor if she talks to trees, she says, “No, I listen.”
Sebastopol’s Julianne Skai Arbor, AKA TreeGirl, is an arborist, photographer, educator, naturalist, forest eco-therapist, and the author of TreeGirl: Intimate Encounters with Wild Nature, an anthology of photographs and natural history of the 50 species of trees she has encountered and photographed herself with.
TreeGirl travels around the world seeking out fantastic-looking trees, and with a remote control and a tripod, she photographs herself, usually naked, in the tree. She has done this with over 80 species of trees in 16 countries.
She also offers forest bathing and eco-therapy classes, most recently at Hidden Forest Nursery just south of Sebastopol. Her goal, according to her website, is to create “an experiential bridge for people to connect with wild nature…and to help us remember that we are nature.”
I caught up with her at Hidden Forest Nursery in April to learn about her life, her art and her ecotherapy practice. We had this conversation at the foot of a large white birch.
Where are you from originally?
I'm from the Chicago area originally, where there weren't any big trees.
And when did you come out to California?
I moved to California in 1993 to go to grad school, and it really changed my life. I discovered the trees of California, and we are really blessed with some of the most magnificent tree species in the world. So that changed my life. I started having tree adventures and realized that trees were my thing.
Were you in a tree-related graduate school field, like botany or something?
No, I was in art. I was in the Arts and Consciousness program at JFK University in the East Bay. That opened me up to all sorts of things like shamanism and creative process and different states of consciousness.
So how did you become TreeGirl?
I’ve traveled all over the world photographing myself—and other women—with some of the most amazing trees all over the world. That started in 1995 when I went to Australia as a kind of vision quest/graduation/solo experience. I had this very mystical experience in the rainforest in Queensland, where I saw these two trees that looked like they were dancing together. (And I wasn't on anything.)
I’d just graduated art school, and I was very experimental. I was traveling with this guy, and I just handed him my camera and said, “I don't know what those trees are doing, but I'm gonna get in there!”
So I took my clothes off and I just wrapped myself around these trees, and said, “Take my picture.” Those pictures themselves weren't very good. But when I saw them and I had that experience, I realized that, wow, I found my thing. I found what lights me up, and ever since then, everywhere I looked, I look at the shape and the form of trees and tried to see if I can fit with the tree, like a dance partner or camouflage or like an animal - like a leopard on a branch or in a cavern. How can I become one with the tree? And that’s how TreeGirl was born.
After that, I just started learning about trees and started traveling around the world photographing trees. When I went to Africa in 2008 to photograph some of the biggest trees in the world, the baobabs, I realized, ‘Oh, this is a book.’
In order to do the book, I had to do all this research on the trees because I thought people would want to know about the natural history. So I was on this tree quest for years and years and years. Trees were like my totem, my people, my allies, my focus.
How did you get involved in ecotherapy and forest bathing?
Forest therapy came onto the scene in America around 2013 and then it kind of exploded around the world. And I thought, ‘Oh, forest therapy. Well, that's what I do. I just do it by myself.’
I got really involved in the movement here and in what became the first program in the U.S to train people how to be forest therapy guides. I collaborated with that program, which was right here right in Sonoma County. I had worked at New College of California and created my own program in environmental art and education, teaching people about the environment through the arts. My whole life was really about reconnecting with nature and helping other people to reconnect with nature.
You’re usually naked in your photos with the trees.
Yeah, here’s a really important thing about the nudity part: I don’t consider myself a nudist or a naturist. It was just my art form and my spiritual path actually. I was never like an exhibitionist or anything.
It's self portrait photography. I use a tripod and a remote control or a device that I attach to the camera so that the camera goes off every 30 seconds. Usually I'm alone and so it's this whole quest that I do. And it's a guerilla art because I don't want to be seen naked, right? And a lot of times I'm in public places. This is where tree communication comes into play. I've had a lot of times where the trees were like, “Okay, you have to get dressed now. Somebody's coming.”
Like most young women, I wasn't really in my body growing up, and I always felt very awkward, like I would never take my clothes off. But then there was something about being wild and free alone with the trees and disappearing into the forest in an endless kind of peaceful meditation and realizing that the trees in the forest—those organisms—they don't judge us. They don't judge us for what we look like or who we are or whatever.
And so the forest became this very supportive place. A lot of people find solace and inspiration in taking walks or sitting under a tree or something like that. So I realized that this is medicine. This is therapeutic.
I got really involved in the eco-psychology and ecotherapy world internationally. I traveled all over the world to do these different ecotherapy conferences. I was actually the United States representative for the International Eco-Psychology Society. I was developing a program to train people. And then I went to Japan in 2019. They have a whole tradition there of forest bathing. It’s called Shinrin-Yoku - that's bathing in the energy of the forest. Just to be clear, there’s no water involved. It’s bathing in the beauty and the aroma.
Tell me about your experience with forest bathing in Japan?
There was an international conference and a training, and it was my 50th birthday. And I knew that some of the biggest, oldest sacred trees on the planet were in Japan. So I went for a month to Japan, and I visited eight forest therapy sites. I went to this conference and this training where there were people from all over the world. I learned a lot about forest medicine. So “forest therapy” is the word that Westerners use, but the Japanese call it “forest medicine.”
It’s interesting because Japan is a very Shinto-Buddhist-spiritually oriented country, and yet there's this kind of a western science mentality that's a little bit separate. So these Japanese scientists did all these very rigorous tests; they take, like, 12 people and they march them out into the forest but beforehand they test their blood pressure and their stress enzymes and then they test them afterwards. It's very clinical—and not very spiritual. There's all these papers showing that the oils that the trees give off—they call them phytoncides—have some chemicals in them to deter infection and pathogens. When you get an essential oil of a tree, sometimes it's from the leaves, sometimes it's from the roots or the bark, and it’s different. All trees have different chemical components.
The hinoki tree, which is a kind of cypress, is only found in Japan. They did this study and found that just if people walked for two hours through a hinoki forest that their natural cancer killer cells would increase by 40% — just from two hours of exposure, and it would last two weeks. And that's just from walking! And so then they mimicked that study with people in hotel rooms with just the essential oils. That's kind of like the landmark forest medicine study.
Did you ever do a guided forest bathing experience in Japan?
When I was in Japan my relationship with trees was very spiritual and energetic and mystical, and I just wanted to see how they did it as opposed to what we were teaching people here and what I did. I found that most of them had a very spiritual, mystical connection with the forest. In fact, some of them were like, “Oh yeah, there's fairies here—and they tell stories.”
And then here's the other thing—in Japan, some of these sacred Shinto trees are really old—some of them are 2,000 years old. I think the oldest one was a 3,000-year-old camphor tree.
It was really humbling going to Japan because the Shinto spiritual system acknowledges the spirit of the tree and not just the tree, but that there are gods and goddesses, and ancestors and spirit beings everywhere. And sometimes spirits will house themselves in ancient trees like a bird in a birdhouse.
I was completely blown away because after 20 years, I'm like, I know how to do this—I know how to listen to a tree. But when I got there, I was humbled very quickly because there is not only the tree and what we would call the spirit of the tree, but often in these big old trees there are spirit guardians with the tree and these other spirits who live in the tree. And so it's like, ‘Which is which? And who is who?’ and, and there's all these layers I had to get through.
These sacred trees they radiate so much energy, I can't imagine anybody—even someone who isn't spiritual or mystical or whatever—being in the presence of those trees and not being, like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! What is going on?”
I could feel this lifeforce energy, this power that I'd never experienced in any other country, even with the giant sequoias or even with the baobabs. In their presence, there was this divinity and sacredness, like when you go into an ancient cathedral. It's a sacred place, right? We've kind of forgotten about that in the United States—the idea that there's a sacred place.
Tell me more about how you do forest therapy?
I don't want people to think that forest therapy is about being naked. I usually try to keep things—my photography and my ecotherapy practice—separate. But even when I do my forest therapy, I do sincerely believe that having the tactile experience of skin-to-skin contact with the forest is crucial, and it goes beyond a normal walk in the woods.
I have been skin-to-skin with over 100 species of trees. And they're all different, just like people are all different. I have that somatic experience in my body. Like I remember what a hinoki is like, I remember what baobab is like, I remember what a redwood is like because of all the little nerves on your skin and on your feet and on your hands. There's something about climbing a tree that's just different than sitting up against a tree or hugging a tree.
I've learned and I teach people to ask permission if you're going to climb into a tree—just like you’d ask permission of a person. You just don't go up to a person you've met at a party and start fondling them, right? It's like you build a relationship: Hey, this is who I am. Who are you? Do I have your permission?
I call what I do ecotherapy rather than forest therapy because I incorporate a lot about eco-psychology, which is the study of people's relationship with nature. My goal is to help people remember that they are nature and there is no separation. That’s a critical thing in our modern world when we're all hooked up to devices all the time.
When I do sessions with people, we spend a lot of time lying on the ground, on the back or on the belly. There's an intimacy there with nature that you don't get when you're standing and walking. There's something that happens with people, especially when they lie on their belly, where there is not only relaxation, but there's this realness and vulnerability that comes out, and you can smell the earth.
If I'm going to have people lay down, of course, I'm aware of things like ticks and poison oak. I like to do redwood duff areas because they're spongy. There's basically no ticks and there's the layers of duff and soil and you're surrounded by these amazing giants. You can look up and be nested in them. I find then that there's a moment when people let go of their minds and they can just be—and it can be quite transformative for people.
Then I lead people through different exercises, which I've developed from my own experience of communication with trees, where I just had trees just say things to me. So when people are like, “Oh, you talk to trees.” And I'm like, “No, I listen.”
This is where the mysticism comes in. I believe that everybody has that capability, but it’s been bred out of us through modernization and social engineering.
I just want to help people open up that portal of consciousness that is inherent in us of interspecies communication, interspecies listening and getting wisdom and guidance and reassurance and ally-ship from the more-than-human world.
Join TreeGirl for an Ecotherapy experience at Hidden Forest Nursery this weekend on Saturday, May 21. Find out more. You can find out more about TreeGirl at treegirl.org.
