Linda Yablonsky, writer and curator of a new show of tree art in New York, says she didn't expect to include so many artists in her exhibition—49—but "I discovered that just about every artist who ever lived has made a tree work."

Three big, prominent, interrelated arttrees in the Northwest spring to mind: Roxy Paine's Split and Mark Dion's Neukom Vivarium at the Olympic Sculpture Park, and Buster Simpson's Host Analog at the Portland Convention Center.

Simpson made his nurse log piece in 1991, more than a decade before Dion trucked his own nurse log down from the watershed and put it in a glass house.

And in a little-known story I'll tell in greater detail in next week's paper, Buster Simpson's original idea for art at Woodstock—Buster was the co-director of art at Woodstock!—was to wrap the diseased Dutch elm trees of New York in something foil-like that would have left them looking quite like Paine's silvery tree at the OSP, made decades later.

Trees: giving the female nude a run for her money since the late 1900s.