1136284

research-article2022
CGJ0010.1177/14744740221136284cultural geographiesStraughan et al.

Article
cultural geographies

Finding comfort and conviviality

2023, Vol. 30(4) 507­–524
© The Author(s) 2022

with urban trees Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14744740221136284
https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740221136284
journals.sagepub.com/home/cgj

Elizabeth Straughan
Catherine Phillips
University of Melbourne, Australia

Jennifer Atchison
University of Wollongong, Australia

Abstract
This paper develops cultural geographic understandings of more-than-human comfort and conviviality by
analysing emails sent to trees living in the City of Melbourne, Australia. The emails arrive from near and
far, sharing personal dilemmas, jokes, poetry, confessions, political concerns, and more. These messages
provide a unique opportunity to consider how trees become foregrounded in people’s everyday
lives. Working through the geographies of comfort expressed in these emails, the paper develops
understanding about the politics of dis/comfort by examining how it is generative of conviviality. In
doing so, the paper builds on a small body of work exploring more-than-human conviviality by bringing
comfort into these discussions. The paper argues this sensibility provides insights into: how and why
attachments between humans and other-than-humans are fostered and maintained; how trees shape
and are shaped by urban places; and, how comfort, as an overlooked element of more-than-human
conviviality, can be politically generative, assisting in the re-imagining of human and tree togetherness.

Keywords
emotion, green space, human-plant relations, Melbourne, more-than-human, urban forest

Introduction
Hello Tree,

I think your possum guard, and the possum guards of some of your fellow trees in Harcourt and Courtney
St, is getting too tight, and your trunk seems to be suffering, am i right? I hope you get some help soon to
loosen the guard, and that your fellow trees do too. (Alex)1

Corresponding author:
Catherine Phillips, School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Melbourne, L1, 221 Bouverie
Street, Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia.
Email: catherine.phillips1@unimelb.edu.au
508 cultural geographies 30(4)

In the City of Melbourne (CoM), Australia, trees are receiving emails. They arrive from near and
far, sharing personal dilemmas, jokes, poetry, confessions, political concerns and more. The emails
come to CoM’s offices through an online platform that hosts an interactive visualisation of the
urban forest’s publicly managed trees (around 80,000) (Figure 1).2 Such online maps are increas-
ingly common for municipalities looking to share information with the public about a city’s urban
forest. However, CoM’s visualisation took their platform’s interactivity further by assigning each
tree an email. The aim was to allow Melbourne residents to tell City staff about maintenance issues
regarding specific trees. It turns out, however, that such emails are rare. Instead, people send trees
all kinds of messages (see the example above), providing a unique opportunity to consider how
trees become foregrounded in people’s everyday lives. Excitement about the initiative’s results has
led to media coverage world-wide,3 spurring further emails. In this paper, we consider a subset of
these emails that, like the opening email, trace the threads of comfort and conviviality.

Figure 1. (left) Screenshot of the City of Melbourne’s online urban forest visualisation, with inset of
information of a select tree, taken by Catherine Phillips (2018); (top right) a pepper tree (Schinus mole) in
a Melbourne park, photo credit: Jaime Murcia, provided courtesy of the City of Melbourne; (bottom right)
a series of mature elms marking the street-park boundary, each with a tight possum guard, photo credit:
Sophie Takách (2019).

Tying conviviality explicitly to comfort, Price et al. assert that as an affective sensibility ‘com-
fort and feeling comfortable is ordinary but at its best it is porous, generative of conviviality,
generosity and empowered embodied experiences’.4 Further, they call for geographers to explore
these connections through examining ‘how comfort is materialised, actioned and verbalised, and
the times, space and place that discomfort becomes comfort’.5 Taking inspiration from these
geographers, our paper considers a more-than-human conviviality generated through different
experiences of comfort/discomfort recounted in emails received by Melbourne trees. This
approach redresses a tendency in urban scholarship to focus on conviviality as human-to-human
encounters. Indeed, recent calls in human geography and planning argue a more-than-human
understanding of sociality is required to cultivate urban greenspaces that will flourish into the
future. This, Jones and Instone argue, involves generating more convivial ways of living with
Straughan et al. 509

urban forests.6 Such conviviality involves ‘accommodation of difference’ that is not restrained to
the human.7 Konijnedijk van den Bosch suggests that more-than-human conviviality might be
achieved by approaching trees as vibrant agents that not only provide benefits for people but play
crucial roles in creating cities.8 These researchers point to a need to consider how people and trees
become (un)comfortable with each other in urban places, and the implications of such feelings for
negotiating shared living in cities.
Attending to the taking place of more-than-human conviviality through comfort, our paper
makes three contributions to cultural geographic literature. First, it develops understanding about
the politics of comfort by examining how it is generative of conviviality and ‘the potential for
change, reflection and living together differently’.9 In doing so, we build on a small body of work
on more-than-human conviviality by bringing non-human comfort into these discussions. Our sec-
ond contribution speaks to cultural geographic debates about attachments and detachments. We
argue an important but overlooked aspect of more-than-human conviviality is how and why attach-
ments are fostered and maintained, and our analysis contributes insights in this regard. Third, we
further understanding about trees as city inhabitants, or ‘residents that shape and are shaped’10 by
the urban in ways that are performative and emotional.
In the following, we consider scholarship on comfort and conviviality in relation to urban green-
ing, followed by an introduction to the data and its context. We then turn to developing the paper’s
contributions across three empirical sections, which consider instances when humans are com-
forted by trees, seek to get comfortable with communicating with a tree, and, lastly, comfort (of
tree and human) is breached, leading to potentially transformative relations.

From comfort to conviviality

Within the emails we analysed, comfort appears as a process of attuning to or noticing the lives of
trees.11 This is a process that signals a growing openness to ‘earth others’12 built through the expe-
rience, or attempts, of working toward comfort as ‘relaxed, consoling, and reassuring’.13 The
empirical sections demonstrate conviviality does not only arise through proximity between human
and tree, it can also be deepened at-a-distance through emailing as a space for experimenting with
human and non-human relations. Recognising its processual qualities, Price et al. argue comfort
can make and unmake worlds, situating it as political.14 Indeed, McNally argues, ‘there is an
important place for investigating where we find comfort in others’15 as it demonstrates where
convivial togetherness can be generated. As a mode of attunement and ethico-politics, the com-
fort/discomfort felt as experience and concern for non-humans matters as it presents a pathway to
conviviality through the building of communal relations.
Conviviality has been used in consideration of diverse human communities. In English, it
tends to be ‘associated with sociable, friendly and festive traits’.16 Reflecting this, some geogra-
phers argue that urban encounters have become increasingly unpredictable and alienating, and
conviviality provides a means of redress. For instance, Amin approaches conviviality as a soli-
darity with space which produces civic ease,17 while Koch and Latham conceptualise convivial-
ity as a way of ‘nurturing the capacity of individuals to thrive in combination with others’.18
However, Gilroy’s thinking on the Spanish convivir/convencia offers a more nuanced approach
to practices of living and labouring together, one that recognises conviviality as ‘negotiation,
friction and sometimes conflict’ rather than simply ‘happy togetherness’.19 Across these regis-
ters, geographers have considered conviviality in different space-times of human interactions,
leading Laurier and Philo to suggest it is an improvised experience emerging in the moment of
the encounter.20
510 cultural geographies 30(4)

Reflecting aims of (happy) conviviality, urban greening has emerged as policy initiative to
‘enhance the quality of social and community interactions’21 in urban public space. Thus, encoun-
ters and feelings of attachment are important considerations as they prompt opportunities and bar-
riers for the development of green space.22 Registering the opportunities, Coley et al. highlight how
urban greening encourages outdoor space use, creating opportunities for social interaction. 23
Further, they note how solitary trees and denser groupings of trees encourage larger groups of
human visitors, while decreasing perceptions of crowdedness, leading to reduced aggression and
more positive interactions. Meanwhile, tree-lined areas are recognised as being important as pro-
viding pleasant places to linger, converse and build relationships with others.24 Neal et al. also
indicate that material characteristics of urban green spaces (e.g. trees, fields, flowers) create peace-
ful environments that draw visitors. Considering conviviality, they argue this is important in bring-
ing together multicultural populations through both momentary encounters and routine
engagements.25 Such knowledge is important for informing urban greening; however, there is little
consideration in this literature of the attachments forged between humans and non-humans, the
frictions and negotiations involved, or the effects of such nuanced conviviality.
Scholars interested in more-than-human conviviality demonstrate concern with the material and
non-material interconnections of entities, including how human and non-human worlds are brought
together (or not) in ways that enable, constrain and eliminate life.26 Exploring what conviviality
means for more-than-human urban geographies, Hinchliffe and Whatmore suggest it points to how
‘realities are enacted, rather than pregiven’.27 Elsewhere, Pearce et al. elaborate on resident-tree
relations, foregrounding perceptions of trees as active participants in urban life and key ‘elements
of the “ethical-political” space of cities’.28 Looking closely at people’s lived experiences and the
who-what-how-why of urban greening, Phillips and Atchison explore how sensibilities and belong-
ings are shaped by and through the relations of arboreal and human inhabitants of cities.29 Further,
Jones and Instone contend it is through embodied, relational encounters with trees that humans
might develop the skills and sensibilities required to share space with, care for and value urban
forests.30 For Rigby, such a project requires attending to how people ‘entangle with, and threaten,
lives and livelihoods of other-kind’31 through conviviality and hospitality in the face of eco-social
destruction. Enabling mutual flourishing may be the aim, but this process cannot be conflict- or
violence-free; non-human and human discomfort will arise.32
In taking a closer look at discomfort, we also add to a body of work that suggests conflict is
necessary for living together well.33 Conviviality can involve the management and negotiation of
frictions. In the context of Australia’s urban greening, Cook et al.34 identify how decision-making
reinforces settler-colonial power relations, and how this must be contested to advance socio-eco-
logical justice and develop understanding of the roles of plants in cities. Elsewhere, Kirkpatrick
et al.35 consider tree-focused debates among professionals and publics. Analysing a range of con-
flicts (e.g. emotional vs instrumental attachments), they highlight challenges for urban forest deci-
sion-making and variations in how those challenges might be addressed.
Tensions also exist regarding modes of engagement. While digitisations like CoM’s may be
understood simply as the public sharing of information, the urban forest visual fosters particular
understandings and encounters with urban trees. As Kitchin and Leszsynski suggest, a shift toward
the digital is not straightforward; instead, such a move requires examination of the geographies
produced by, through and of the digital.36 In a recent review, Prebble et al.37 examine how smart
urban forest initiatives reinforce neoliberal governance and inequalities, while simultaneously
opening possibilities for community feedback and the enhancement of urban nature connections.
CoM’s email-a-tree initiative, thus, provides scope to develop understanding about how platforms
and emails ‘facilitate or reshape civic engagement with forests and environmental change’,38 shap-
ing geographies39 in the process.
Straughan et al. 511

The task of a more-than-human approach in this context is to account for the attachments, contesta-
tions and negotiations involved in how urban human-nonhuman relations take shape. The emails sent
to Melbourne trees are important in this context as they sensitise us to how people think and feel about
trees, demonstrating how trees (and non-humans more broadly) have import beyond the conventions
of urban planning. As a mode of attuning to earth others, efforts to learn and foster comfort spotlight
enabling relations that help build connections across difference. Such connections, not always pleasant
or easy, are politically generative as they assist the re-imagining of human and tree togetherness.

Emailing Melbourne’s trees

Located on the south-east coast of Australia, Melbourne was settled by Europeans beginning in 1835,
occupying the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and the Bunurong Boon Wurrung peo-
ple. Now an inner suburb of Greater Melbourne, CoM has a population of approximately 170,000
that during the workweek increases to about 1 million. Across approximately 37 km2, CoM manages
park and street trees numbering almost 80,000, with high numbers of London Planes, Spotted Gums
and English Elms (for examples see Figure 2). Droughts and heatwaves, along with ageing stock,
threaten the urban forest. This has led CoM to expand, densify and diversify plantings. For instance,
the first Urban Forest Strategy (2012–2032) set a goal of increasing canopy cover from 22% to 40%
by 2040.40 Through various strategies and programmes, including the email-a-tree initiative, CoM
has become known for progressive urban greening and community engagement.41

Figure 2. Examples of trees in Melbourne’s urban forest, including native and non-native as well as street
and park trees. Photo credits: (left) Catherine Phillips (2019); (middle) Jaime Murcia, courtesy of the City
of Melbourne; (right, top and bottom) Sophie Takách (2019).

To learn how people were thinking and feeling about trees as expressed in the emails to trees,
the research team formed a collaboration with CoM. The overall research project involves qualita-
tive, quantitative and spatial analysis, along with artistic and community engagement elements.
512 cultural geographies 30(4)

The qualitative aspect, upon which this paper draws, involved a multi-person iterative coding
process of de-identified emails resulting in thematic insights. The emails range in length from short
greetings (‘hello tree, how’s your day been?’) to reflections of several paragraphs. Some trees
receive more emails than others; the most emailed tree, for example, received 75 emails. Emails
come from around the world, in different languages, from people of varied ages (as inferred from
emails, e.g. having known a tree for generations or ‘I’m doing a school project[. . .]’) After a series
of tests and calibrations, about half of the emails (n = 1,650 of 3,251) were manually coded, split
between the beginning, middle and end of the study period (2012–2018). This initial coding pro-
vided focus for coding across the data along select themes. As exemplars: personification appears
in an overwhelming majority of emails through modes of address (e.g. ‘Dear Lemona[. . .]’), nam-
ing versus numbering of trees, and pronoun use (e.g. you); despite the intended purpose of the
initiative, few requests are lodged for practical tree management (e.g. tree pruning or replacement);
and emotional attachments to trees were stark and wide-ranging; the data is full of feelings of joy,
loneliness, curiosity, love, grief, et cetera. As a theme, comfort encompasses explicit and implicit
mentions (e.g. ‘[. . .]You have offered me lots of comfort as I look at you from my office win-
dow[. . .]’, ‘[. . .]I would like to comfort you in your last year[. . .]’, or feeling able to share with
a tree what could not be otherwise shared). Further, the theme of comfort relates not only to peo-
ple’s comfort but concern for a tree’s comfort. This is evident in the opening email to the street tree
(a Celtis australis) in which a practical management request is made (check the possum guard) but
through concern for tree comfort. This article draws on our qualitative analysis to reflect on human
and nonhuman comfort as part of processes enacting conviviality.

Arboreal comfort zones

Acknowledging that comfort is ordinary,42 this section considers the mundane ways in which tree
and human bodies, in proximity to each other, produce this quality of feeling. Emails to Melbourne’s
trees highlighted prior embodied encounters and the import of this intimacy, connecting with
Bissell’s reflection that comfort ‘emerges from a number of other sensibilities such as quietness,
solitude, relaxation, slowness, and beauty’.43 For example, emailers alluded to the calming affect
of sitting with a tree:

Dear Tree,

I quite often visit you on a weekend (or after work if it’s a warm night) to sit under you and listen to music
and read. It’s either you or one of your friends – so if it is a friend please pass on my email. It was hard to
tell exactly on the map. Either way, you are very calming! Thanks for you being you, Tree.

Cheers,
(Cameron)

For Bissell, comfort is experienced through relations among proximate bodies and objects. Sedentary
bodies can, therefore, participate in comfort. Bissell contends that by attending to affective capaci-
ties of immobile bodies, we can explore the different ways in which comfort is experienced.44 This
underscores the import of ‘Tree’ to Cameron’s comfort, which emerges via repeated encounters
between tree and human bodies. This is a comfort that connects with a sense of calm and stillness.
In work on therapeutic spaces, Conradson attends to stillness as an ‘internal state of calm in which
a person becomes more aware of their immediate embodied experience of the world and less con-
cerned with events occurring “out there”’.45 Other emailers reiterate this notion with comments like
Straughan et al. 513

‘[. . .]There is so much on my mind, Yet the sight of you makes me feel so calm. [. . .]’ or ‘[. . .]You
bring so much peace to my day.[. . .]’. Cameron emailed a Pin Oak that boasts an oval canopy of
deep green leaves, resulting in filtered, cooling shade in summer. While the middle branches are
horizontal, the lower branches drop down, cocooning the space around the trunk. These material
characteristics create an ‘experiential texture’ that we suggest situates this tree as a ‘place of retreat’
where renewal and restoration can occur.46 The comfort experienced by Cameron develops along-
side a sense of improved wellbeing.
Other emailers are more explicit in describing how relations between tree and human bodies
produce an experiential texture that supports comfort and wellbeing. For example:

Dear Moreton Bay Fig,

You are beautiful. Sometimes I sit or walk under you and feel happier. I love the way the light looks
through your leaves and how your branches come down so low and wide it is almost as if you are trying to
hug me. It is nice to have you so close, I should try to visit more often. You are my favourite tree because
you are a native, standing proud in a cultivated English garden of colonising trees, imported to remind
settlers of a home they may never return to. You remind me to be as strong and beautiful as you are.

Thanks,
(Pasha)

Pasha draws attention to how this tree’s aesthetic presence contributes toward feeling ‘happier’.
The way light or wind played in leaves, the smell of blossoms, the cool of offered shade, the way
a tree changed the feel of a place, among other aesthetic experiences were noted by emailers, usu-
ally in connection with desired states of being (e.g. peace, calm, inspiration). For Pasha, the tree’s
body, in terms of its shape and interaction of leaves and sunlight, is important, but there is also a
haptic sensibility of the enveloping effect of drooping branches aligned with the reassuring feeling
of being hugged. Bissell notes that this comforting quality is actively designed in First-Class chairs
for trains to reassure and facilitate relaxation.47 However, Pasha’s reflections are not so literal, nor
is the tree designed this way. Rather, in the company of Moreton Bay Fig, Pasha describes ‘a felt
proximity separate and distinct from actual physical contact’,48 a ‘felt dimensionality’.49 This is
what Wyschgrod calls a ‘metaphorical touching as a feeling of impingement upon and proximity
to the world’.50 Paterson’s analysis of such felt presence situates it as an interpersonal affect.
Pasha’s experience extends such observations beyond the human, pointing to situations where felt
tree presence brings comfort.
The comfort found in these ‘performative qualities’ sits alongside Pasha’s perception of this tree
as ‘native’. Such classifications are problematic as they entrench a boundary between ‘native’ and
‘non-native’; in Australia this is significant as it relates to plant presence prior to European colonisa-
tion not plant capacities.51 Further, such categorisations enable ‘familiar human desires and expecta-
tions to be misconstrued as essential belonging relationships between biota, places and eras’.52 The
bounds of such classifications also vary; indeed, these fig trees are endemic to Australia but not to the
state of Victoria. Perhaps intensified by this tree’s location at an entrance to Fitzroy gardens, estab-
lished by the Colonial Government in 1848, we suggest Pasha’s is a comfort that includes reliance on
positioning ‘English’ trees as colonising. Such comfort from ‘natives’ was uncommon across the
emails; more frequently comfort came from other tree qualities and associated symbolism.
Echoing Cloke and Jones,53 large trees and their enduring presence often provide a point of
reference in the emails. For example, a Spotted Gum in Royal Park (see Figure 3) gets the follow-
ing email from An:
514 cultural geographies 30(4)

Dear Spotted Gum,

I want to tell you a story about me, which is actually a story about you. Maybe you know it already.
Maybe you can tell it better than I can. I first laid eyes on you one hot summer evening on a stroll
through Royal Park. I had arrived in Australia just a week earlier as a study abroad student and I was
missing home like a part of me had vanished. But the day I saw you changed me. The field around you
was glowing golden in the falling light and the lorikeets sang their hunger through the boughs of
eucalyptus trees.

It?s clich‚, I know, to say that you took my breath away, but you took my breath away. You were this
strong, solitary monument and you made me want to burst into tears of happiness at the sight of you. Your
smooth, pale skin smelled of parched earth and sunlight. Your arms were graceful, spreading from your
trunk into a network of veins that extended into the sky. And the shape of you?a perfect half-dome above
my head? made me feel protected in your shadow.

Over the next year I spent hours beneath your branches, reading and writing and playing guitar, missing
my home half a world away, wishing that Melbourne had been my home all along. You see, Spotted Gum,
you were my tether. Whenever I started to drift off into loneliness or self-doubt, you were there to tug me
back to myself. You were, like the city itself, welcoming and mysterious.

There were days when you felt like my tree, and you greeted me as an old friend. Other days I would
feel a cool, wary breeze filter through your branches and I would know that you were in one of your
moods and to keep my distance until it passed. This is how the story of you weaves into the story of me.
If you did not stand with such strength and purpose with nowhere to hide I might never have learned
how to, either.

I wanted you to know, Spotted Gum, that there is no such thing as ‘just a tree’ I wanted to thank you for
humouring my tentative guitar strumming, for casting your sun-pricked shade upon my cheeks.

Thank you for giving me a place to belong.

Ever yours, (An)

Figure 3. Spotted Gum (SG), located in Royal Park, emailed by An. Photo credit: Sophie Takách (2019).
Straughan et al. 515

An describes a process of becoming attached to Spotted Gum (SG) after a being separated –
detached – from human connections. An draws comfort from a strength observed in this tree.
Such symbolism, Rival suggests, draws attention to a moral quality that spotlights how a per-
son might identify with a tree.54 Indeed, given An’s recent isolation from community and sup-
port networks, it is notable that their observation is followed by acknowledgement of this
tree’s solitary positioning, suggesting An draws comfort from seeing SG thrive within an
enduring solitude. This is an endurance that An learns from, one that emerges between tree and
human.
However, An’s encounter with SG cannot be reduced to visual or symbolic attributes. An
describes how this tree’s company pulls them back from feelings of loneliness. In research on
loneliness, Franklin tells us that to stave off this emotion, social bonds need to have ‘emotional
qualities or intensities that make people feel they belong, they matter, and that they are cared for’.55
An feels so welcome in SG’s place that they are drawn to return; SG provides a place of belonging,
illustrating an attachment that keeps loneliness at bay.
We suggest An’s email teases apart how urban trees can become ‘comfort zones’ for some
Melbournians, a point that resonates across the emails discussed in this section. Prazeres explains
that through their ‘physical, embodied and affective space[s] of familiarity and comfort’, such com-
fort zones ‘provide a temporary respite from the stresses and uncertainties of living, working and/or
studying in a foreign country’56 Importantly for Prazeres, comfort zones require reproduction by
spending time ‘and (re)creating everyday routines in these places’.57 An’s practice of reading and
responding to SG’s ‘moods’ suggests a flexible routine that changes in accordance with atmospheric
and sensory experiences of this tree place. This co-produced familiarity is suggestive of a process of
becoming comfortable that aligns with Ahmed’s conceptualisation of comfort as ‘an encounter
between more than one body, which is the promise of a “sinking” feeling. To be comfortable is to be
so at ease with one’s environment that it is hard to distinguish where one’s body ends and the world
begins’.58 Ahmed describes a blurring of boundaries here that echoes within An’s powerful reflec-
tion that their story is one that relays how ‘the story of you weaves into the story of me’ which, in
turn, suggests a growing ease. The sensitivity shown by An for tree being and comfort is a theme we
build on and take forward in the next empirical sections.

Negotiating awkwardness
Distinguishing conviviality apart from friendly sociability, Nowicka and Vertovec highlight the
concept as an ‘analytical tool to ask the ways, and under what conditions, people constructively
create modes of togetherness’.59 Bringing such understanding to an analysis of more-than-human
conviviality, this section focuses on the various negotiations involved in how we relate to earth
others. Specifically, we consider how ‘accommodation of difference in urban space’60 emerges
through negotiations of address, negotiations that are an important part of becoming ‘at ease with
difference’.61 We make this claim in response to a vast majority of the emails sent to trees in
Melbourne that insist on tree personification. Emailers displayed strong resistance to using
assigned tree identification numbers accompanied by attempts to consider what an appropriate
address might be. Greetings like ‘Dearest Green Leafed Friend[. . .]’, ‘Hi LSG [lemon-scented
gum][. . .]’, ‘Dear Mr. Chestnut[. . .]’ or ‘Hello my special tree[. . .]’ run throughout the emails.
Such messaging might be dismissed as having a bit of fun, but we read this differently. The emails
go beyond engaging with trees in amusing ways and, whether intentional or not, such emails resist
an understanding of trees simply as numbered objects in cities. This negotiation of address – a
dual process of learning to feel comfortable with trees in a way that also accounts for the comfort
516 cultural geographies 30(4)

of trees – is often characterised by an awkwardness that is part of the process of more-than-human

conviviality.
This sensability extends more-than-human scholarship on awkwardness. Lorimer explains that
‘as an adjective, awkward describes the unfamiliar, the clumsy and the unskilled. It conveys embar-
rassment, inconvenience, and risk. To be awkward is to be ill at ease, uncomfortable or unto-
ward’.62 This awkwardness, he suggests, can be understood as part of a process of comparison of
the ‘distinguishing properties’ of humans and non-humans. Regarding trees, these properties relate
to bodily forms, kinds of mobilities, lifespans and rhythms, means of communication and so on,63
which can spur curiosity, appreciation, even disgust, affecting the capacity for people to ‘tune into’
other living creatures.64 To be clear, awkwardness does not always signal a negative experience, it
can also be generative as ‘[d]isconcerting encounters across difference have the potential to prompt
thought, practice and politics’.65 As the emails below suggest, some emailers were uneasy about
how to write to a tree but forged ahead:

Dear 1040090,
Is it okay if I call you George? 1040090 seems so impersonal. I was trying to contact your neighbor next
to the path, but it looks like he was removed. I’m sorry about that. Do you miss him? I hope you get a new
neighbor soon. Aloha from Honolulu! (Taylor)

Dear Mr/Miss Sydney blue gum,

Sorry for calling you a eucalyptus in the last email. What can I call you? I live in Brisbane, so I don’t yet
know what you look like. Could you send me a picture? I would love that. Thank you so much for replying
to the last email.
From (Devin)

Taylor’s and Devin’s email demonstrate a clumsiness of address, yet they also indicate attempts
to develop a vocabulary as a practice of conversing and getting comfortable with a tree. For
Taylor, this stems from a perceived shortcoming in addressing a tree as a number. For Devin, this
connects with a prior attempt at identification, which is felt to require an apology. And these
emailers are not alone; others make comments such as ‘[. . .]Sorry I don’t know your real name,
hmmmm, this is awkward. OK, for now I shall call you Tim. How’s it going Tim?[. . .]’ or ‘[. . .]
What should I call you? Do you like Oak? Or would you prefer something else?[. . .]’ In this
context, ‘awkwardness in encounters with non-mammalian life is temporally unstable. It relates
in part to developing skills, habits and modes of relating’.66 Within the awkwardness of address,
these exemplars show an effort to develop a considerate relation with these Melbourne trees. For
Taylor, this commitment is suggested through a proposed name for tree ‘1040090’, while for
Devin the question ‘What can I call you?’ signals a process of trying to become familiar with this
tree and its preferences. In this way, both emails suggest a concern for tree, and not just human,
comfort.
In Taylor’s and Devin’s emails, among others, the use of language and experimentation with
perceived tree identity suggests an effort to find passage to more comfortable relations with a par-
ticular tree. Certainly, these emails do not suggest that comfortable relations have been reached,
but they are indicative of a practice through which an ease might be accomplished. These efforts
are suggestive of an attempt to build a ‘dialogue’ with living beings beyond humans such that the
conversation is respectful, inclusive, and leaves room ‘to be surprised, to be challenged, and to be
changed’.67
It is notable, that amid the awkwardness of address, we also find comic messages that play with
language and a tree’s everyday living. For example:
Straughan et al. 517

Hi dear Cyprus Plane tree,

Do you mind if I address you by your full name? -

Rather more poetic than a number eh?

I have a question for you. . . If I may? Are you lonely for other leafy loves? Do you bend and twist
longingly searching out your foliage friends? Would you like to have some other bough tickle yours? Or
share a visit from a magpie with a friend?
Lets get you a companion or two.. Close enough for you to sense support when the wind blows, To lock
boughs with when the autumn wind strips your happy shape from you. And to increase your abundance of
shade once summer arrives.

How about it Melbourne City Council?

(Char)

The awkwardness of address here is accompanied by humourous framing of tree feelings and move-
ments based in anthropomorphism. While the value of anthropomorphism is debated,68 Parkinson
argues it is ‘a disruptive force, a capacity for imaginative appreciation of another perspective . . . and
it can play a role in the development of empathetic relationships with other animals’.69 Like some
other emails to Melbourne trees, the use of this kind of comic anthropomorphism can, purposefully
or not, serve to feel a way toward cross-species communication by (at least) disrupting norms of
objectifying and instrumentalising non-humans. As Rosengren observes, laughter is ambivalent and
can be used for malicious ends, but ‘good laughter’ – laughter that is shared among others – can help
produce ‘a mode of knowledge that plays its part in the generation of conviviality’.70
The combination of humour and anthropomorphism is a technique that aims to get to know the
tree on human terms; however, the inclusion of curious questions in the emails in this section
(among many others) suggests a different approach. Through asking about comfort experienced by
trees, these emailers enact what Phillips71 calls social curiosity. This is a curiosity that recognises
and acts on a recognition of ignorance about another. Considered generative of conviviality, social
curiosity can be a ‘[v]ehicle for meaningful encounters with others, initially for navigating social
distances and differences in diverse societies, but ultimately for interrogating these fundamental
terms’.72 This argument builds on Wilson’s assertion that the work of finding out about and engag-
ing with others can result in the ‘production of connection’.73 Acting on their limited knowledge,
some emailers, like the one quoted above, use a social curiosity that aims to get to know these trees
on their own terms by asking questions directed at them – ‘[. . .]how are you feeling?[. . .]’, ‘[. . .]
what’s the funniest thing you have ever seen?[. . .]’, ‘[. . .]How is it that you get enough water with
such a small patch of land to work with?[. . .]’, ‘[. . .]Are you friends with other trees?[. . .]’,
‘[. . .]I figure you’ve seen some things in your time. Can you tell me a story please?[. . .]’. In this
way, the email becomes a space of social curiosity that, in turn, can facilitate a process of attune-
ment and the ‘forging of relationships’.74
In sum, these emails illustrate practices of producing comfort through creatively enacting
human-tree communication. Price et al. tell us such comfort-focused practice can be ‘world-mak-
ing’, particularly when it involves humour for, as Emmerson suggests, to ‘laugh is to know the
world a different way’.75 Through an awkward curiosity that is empathetic, these emails display an
enabling concern for getting comfortable with trees and for the comfort of trees as a process of
attachment. Striving for both human and non-human comfort in this way enacts what Wise
describes as ‘convivial labour’, or the ‘enacted, negotiated, practiced and cumulative labour that
goes into provisionally successful situations of lived difference’76 Emails sharing concern,
518 cultural geographies 30(4)

curiosity and humour with trees signal practices of more-than-human conviviality involving learn-
ing about and attending to the ways of trees.

Breaching comfort
This last empirical section further addresses a subset of emails that focus on how comfort ‘is rela-
tionally contingent on discomfort’.77 As an experience considered central to social change, discom-
fort is generative of both connection and disconnection.78 While much work on conviviality
positions it as an affirmative experience, conviviality is not simply about accepting and accom-
modating difference, it also involves the active shaping of spaces for negotiating challenges.79 To
explore this further, this section considers one email that details a breach that creates discomfort
for both tree and human, prompting further response:

Hello Elm

We met in the wee hours this morning. But though I gazed up at you and was working in front of you for
about 6 hours I never introduced myself. My name is (Flynn) and I am the one who contributed to your top
branch being broken.

I am writing to apologize. I am sorry both for allowing the ladder to be brought down through your canopy
snapping your extremity and for pretending that it was unimportant. In my work we priorities lives over
property yet the life of plants doesn’t get a mention. You would have seen the flames from your upper
branches and sensed the proximity and danger of the fire so I hope you can understand our frenzy to act and
extinguish the blaze before it spread. You may not even mind sacrificing a branch for that cause, I don’t
know. Perhaps however what you can not understand is that no one showed you any empathy, your life was
potentially in danger too and you were injured and all we cared about was getting our job done and not
damaging our expensive equipment in the process. Who is to say what is more important. Honestly, I value
trees over buildings. A building is only a habitat for a person (or a business, which is simply redistributing
wealth between a few people) but a tree creates habitat for the whole world. The world survived happily for
a very long time without buildings but without trees? I wouldn’t want to think what that would be like.

I guess I’m trying to say that you may not see it from the way humans act and treat you and your kind but
you are valued. I’m sorry I caused you injury, that I didn’t protect you and that I don’t do more to protect
all trees. I lie here totally sleep deprived yet unable to sleep and I don’t understand why I do what I do. I
like to think that it is worthwhile, making the world a better place but perhaps my efforts are futile in that
regard. You make the world a better place simply by existing. That is very admirable. I’m glad our paths
crossed.

Take care
Love (Flynn)

In geography, and beyond, violence toward non-humans has been considered as inherent to conser-
vation approaches.80 However, the email from Flynn highlights how such violence also occurs
accidentally, during other activities, and at different intensities. In this instance, an unintended act
of violence occurs in the process of protecting human life and the non-organic materiality of the
city from a building fire.
Flynn’s apologetic email indicates three aspects of an early morning tree encounter that bring
discomfort. First, no introductions were performed despite a long, intimate sharing of space.
Second, guilt at having caused physical harm – broken a branch – is confessed. And third, Flynn
Straughan et al. 519

expresses discomfort with their initial response to this violence. With time and space away from
the scene, shame builds in Flynn. This shame is indicative of ‘[d]iscomfort as a feeling-sense,
moment of or process of rupture’,81 through which this fire fighters’ values crystalise. For Probyn,
‘what makes shame remarkable is that it reveals with precision our values, hopes and aspirations,
beyond the generalities of good manners and cultural norms’.82 In short, shame ‘goes to the heart
of who we think we are’.83 For Flynn, this involves coming to terms with feeling for a non-human
entity whose comfort is generally overlooked in everyday street life and acknowledging that Elm
could – and should – be treated differently. Shame, for Flynn, acts ‘as a switch point for imagining
[tree] consciousness’ and feeling,84 driving them into sleeplessness and the redressive action of
emailing an apology.
This email spotlights a positivity that underlines shame as it indicates a process of re-evaluating
past actions to consider the ethics and practices involved in living with urban trees. Though less
developed than Flynn’s, many apologies are found in the emails – for not knowing or misunder-
standing something about a tree (akin to Devin’s message above) or how to care for them, or, most
commonly, for not being able to visit a tree for various reasons. Such apologies reflect a humility
that aligns with Plumwood’s comments on reciprocity between humans and earth others:

We can learn to look for comfort and continuity, meaning and hope in the context of the earth community,
and work in this key place to displace the hierarchical and exceptionality cultural framework that so often
defeats our efforts to adapt to the planet. This involves re-imagining ourselves through the concrete
practices of restraint and humility, not just vague airy-fairy concepts of unity.85

Flynn’s email, among others, suggests such a re-imagining is in process, and that it involves a
complex entwinning of varied discomforts: recognition of the transgression of the tree’s corporeal-
ity and its discomfort; a growing feeling signalling a transgression of appropriate relation with
Elm; and the rejection of cultural norms of feeling associated with the nature/culture binary.86 All
this leaves Flynn feeling uncomfortable. And the associated re-evaluation points to a deepening
awareness. Indeed, Flynn lays their discomfort bare to Elm through this email, suggesting an open-
ness and vulnerability in offering apology (though not necessarily receiving forgiveness).
This email, along with all the others quoted thus far, highlights the power of the digital geogra-
phy set in motion by CoM’s email-a-tree initiative. With caveats about their challenges and inequi-
ties, Prebble et al. assert that digital technologies like the visualisations and its emails afford the
creation, support and enhancement of human-nature relationships ‘because platform data can help
users connect with more-than-human affects establishing more direct yet complex understandings
and relationships’.87 The email-a-tree initiative provides opportunity to reflect on Gabrys’s88 query
about what digital technologies do for generating different kinds of practices, geographies and
ontologies. Seeking to further an attachment with each emailed tree, these emailers utilise CoM’s
platform to share their experiences and reflections, seeking to enhance and repair breaches in
human and non-human comfort. In doing so, they exploit the opportunity to email trees to illustrate
existing values and aspirations for more-than-human conviviality in the city.

Conclusion
In this paper, we have considered comfort as experiences through which some humans move
toward convivial relations with urban trees. In conclusion, we address our three contributions
and their implications. First, eschewing assumptions of always and already formed attachments,
we highlighted the process of becoming attached via experiences of comfort. Attending to the
520 cultural geographies 30(4)

processes and practices through which humans seek and find comfort with trees, we have
extended understanding about how attachments not only exist but how they can form across
human-nonhuman differences. In doing so, we note that what is at stake for the humans involved
are deep feelings and valued experiences that expose such attachments. Reflecting insights into
these attachments, and second, we reinforced research pointing to how trees act and are appreci-
ated less as enumerated urban infrastructure elements and more as urban inhabitants, inhabitants
that are not only shaped by the urban context but shaping of the places they live. Continued
deployment of simplistic or dismissive notions of attachment between people and trees limits the
possibilities for both.
Entwined with these two contributions, and third, we have shown how negotiating comfort can
be generative of more-than-human conviviality, taking human-tree relations well beyond the domi-
nant remit in urban greening of nature-based solutions. Our first empirical section demonstrated
this involves embodied, emplaced experiences to facilitate a sense of co-presence and ease. We
then considered how the awkward work of imagining the right language for a human-tree com-
munication speaks to a desire for mutually comfortable multispecies relations. Our final empirical
section looked at how the writing of discomfort demonstrates a re-imagining of both tree and
human comfort that portrays a growing awareness of and respect for urban trees. Moving beyond
communication about trees, these emails are addressed to trees. This sense-making reflects a more-
than-human phenomenon involving attunement to and accommodation of the comforts and dis-
comforts of tree and human lives. Notably, such sense-making is sometimes obvious but, at other
times, it remains speculative, gestural, almost-thought possibility. For humans, the discomforts/
comforts of trees, and other non-humans are, at least partially, unknowable. Keeping this in mind,
an understanding of a more-than-human notion of conviviality could be useful in thinking about
how to recognise urban places as not-only-human domains.
The pathways to comfort we outlined show how conviviality emerges through an openness to
earth others. Yet, there is unease in the process. Emailers expose themselves in emails – through
addressing a tree as a subject, through admitting to disrespect or limited understanding, by trying
to grasp another way of being with trees. This suggests the emails are a practice of sharing and
exploring comfort and conviviality, and that exposure, risk and vulnerability can intensify con-
viviality. The digital visualisation, and more specifically the space of the email, is instrumental
here as it provides an opportunity to work through how to become comfortable with the process
of learning about, communicating with, and supporting the comfort of trees. It also shows how the
digital can foster conviviality at a distance by intensifying relations with trees even when they are
far away. We suggest this case provides scope to consider more broadly the implications of digi-
talisation, particularly emailing, as a practice that can both inform and generate community
engagement by enabling the building of connections and shaping urban relationships through
expressions of comfort, care and conviviality. As a serendipitous emergent outcome of CoM’s
initiative, further policy research might usefully consider the tensions of how such unforeseen
opportunities, which also present risk for urban greening authorities, can be facilitated and sus-
tainably supported.

Acknowledgements
Our deepest thanks to all the trees and emailers who shared moments of their lives with us for this research.
Thank you to the City of Melbourne (especially David Callow, Kelly Hertzog, Freya Thomas and Ian Shears)
for facilitating access to the data and ongoing discussions that informed our work. Thanks also to the National
Trust of Australia, Jaime Murcia (via CoM), and Sophie Takách for permission to use their photos. Finally,
we are grateful for the constructive comments of the anonymous reviewers, and especially for Dydia DeLyser’s
generous editorial engagement.
Straughan et al. 521

Data availability statement

For legal and ethical reasons, the research dataset for this project is not openly available. The City of
Melbourne holds the dataset and restrictions apply to its availability. The dataset was accessed under a legal
research collaboration agreement between University of Melbourne, and University of Wollongong, and City
of Melbourne. Selected data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author
upon reasonable request and with permission of the City of Melbourne.

Ethics approval
University ethics approval and a collaborative research agreement with the City of Melbourne governed
research conduct. As a collaborating partner, the City has provided feedback on the draft of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article: The research was funded by internal grants from the University of Melbourne and
University of Wollongong and, later, by an Australian Research Council grant (Phillips, Atchison & Head,
DP210100884).

ORCID iD
Elizabeth Straughan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5305-2715

Notes
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Author biographies
Elizabeth Straughan is a Human Geographer with interest in the sensory experiences and embodied practices
through which humans engage with environments. Attentive to the social, ethical and political implications of
524 cultural geographies 30(4)

these engagements, she is particularly interested in their emotional geographies. She is currently a postdoc-
toral researcher in the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Science at the University of Melbourne
on the project ‘Understanding contested human-plant geographies for urban greening success’.
Catherine Phillips is a senior lecturer in the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the
University of Melbourne. Her research examines nature-society relations, and their implications, in everyday
life and in environmental governance. She is author of Saving More Than Seeds: practices and politics of seed
saving (Routledge, 2013) and co-editor of Vegetal Politics: Belonging, practices, and places (2017). Recent
work focuses on experiences and governance of urban natures, discard and waste material politics, and agri-
food system transformation.
Jennifer Atchison is associate professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the Australian
Centre for Culture, Environment, Society and Space (ACCESS) at the University of Wollongong, Australia.
Her work engages with human nature relations in the context of rapid environmental change. She has a pas-
sion for plants, and her research seeks to understand the place of plants in past, present and future lives.