I was walking to my car in the auction-house parking lot when I saw a mass of tall wooden posts jutting out of some containers. Perhaps they were trash waiting to be discarded, I thought.
As I got closer to my car and them, I decided that I couldn’t leave without knowing exactly what these things were. The closer I got the more intriguing they became.
Now face to face with them, I saw that they were copper sculptures of trees. They were amazing. A lovely treat for a yard. I was so fascinated that I walked all around the trees, which seemed so out of place in a parking lot.
Some were positioned inside oversized planters with gray river stones scattered around the top or completely covering it. Spotlights were angled in their bases. Other trees were set into painted platforms no more than half a foot off the ground.
The metal sculptures seemed to be 8 to 12 feet tall or more. They were sculpted to look like real trees – capturing their natural misshapen growth – with branches extending from them. Small individual pieces of copper were fused at various junctures to mimic the form.
They resembled a stand of trees that you could get lost in (but you couldn’t because they didn’t have any leaves to hide you). On one side, the sun played off the copper, bathing the trees in a bright warm light on a chilly day. On the other side, left-over snow formed a barrier in front of the structures and the lack of sunshine dulled their finish.
Copper, I learned, is one of only two metals on the periodic table – gold is the other – that is not silver or gray. Simply put, copper get its color because it absorbs some of the light that hits it, and reflects it back to us as red and orange. Pennies were made with 95 percent copper until 1982, but now they’re made mostly of zinc and a bit of copper.
The trees in the parking lot still had their new-penny color, indicating that they had not been left outside for a long period. Over time, contact with the atmosphere can give copper a green patina, as in the Statue of Liberty, which is wrapped in copper plates. When it was first erected in the 1880s, the statue was shiny, but oxidation – which protects the copper – turned it green. Officials decided during a restoration in 1986 to leave the green patina as protection from the elements.
As for the trees at auction, I assumed that they were consigned by a commercial plant store because several still had stickers on them, including “SOLD” and a description, “Planter, Metal Trees.” A few had price tags: $175 on trees situated on a platform and what looked like $250 on trees in a planter.
Googling, I could find no others like them. Most on the web were small copper wire sculptures of trees.
Here’s what I saw:
