CAMBRIDGE — It’s not unusual at an exhibition for frames to catch the eye more than what’s in those frames. When that happens, it tends to be because the frames are so fancy: ornate, elaborately carved, often gilt covered. With “Forest Futures,” the frames both catch the eye and warm the heart. That’s not because of any fanciness — quite the opposite. It’s that the frames are so simple, so functional, and numerous enough that they present themselves as, yes, a kind of small, interior forest.
“Forest Futures” runs through March 31 at the Druker Design Gallery of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Curated by the GSD’s Anita Berrizbeitia, it’s inspired by a seminar she teaches, Forests: History and Future Narratives.
The show is itself unusual, appealingly so. First, though, let’s talk a bit more about those frames. They’re wooden armatures, seven of them, 8-feet tall, made of unpainted fir 2x4s and plywood. Each holds eight to a dozen subsidiary frames. Presented within those frames are variously mounted photographs, charts, architectural renderings, explanatory texts. The armatures stand in the center of the gallery. Along the walls are exhibited other items: videos, photographs, informational graphics, books, two large displays of postcards (which visitors are welcome to take).
All relate in some way to trees, forests, forestation. “Forest Futures” is about silviculture, the growing and cultivation of trees. Isn’t that a lovely word? The show draws on science, design, politics, economics, anthropology, even religion (a display is dedicated to a sacred grove in Nigeria).
One of the videos offers overlapping glimpses of 18 forests far and wide, from Athol to Zurich, the Catskills to Cuba. An animated map follows the global impact on forests of the four chief contributors to deforestation: logging, agriculture, grazing, and fire. A striking reminder of fire is the nearby presence of a burnt aspen trunk.
There are pencil sketches of “the oasis effect” (how planting, and tending, of a single date palm can over time create a virtuous ecological circle); a photograph of Joseph Beuys planting a sapling; more than two dozen photographs by Stanley Greenberg of parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted; an animated dataset measuring forests in the Congo Basin; a look at the 18th-century English outlaw Dick Turpin and a sociocultural history of one of his preferred hideouts, Epping Forest; mentions of such pertinent topics as canopy equity, citizen foresters, street trees, forest parks, and urban groves.
Among places featured in “Forest Futures” are Atlanta, Los Angeles, Johannesburg, Japan (70 percent of which is tree covered), Bogotá, Barcelona, Paris, Mumbai, Taiwan, Washington, D.C., Tampa, Riyadh (Riyadh? yes, Riyadh), Guinea-Bissau, New York, and, since silviculture in an age of climate change begins at home, Cambridge and Boston (including but not limited to its Urban Forest Plan).
That may make it seem as though there’s an awful lot going on in “Forest Futures,” and there is. That isn’t even mentioning Charles Sprague Sargent’s “Sixteen Maps Accompanying Report on Forest Trees of North America” (1884), Charles Eliot’s visionary conception of Blue Hills Reservation, or how Oslo is seen as a model for forest clearing in metropolitan areas.
So “Forest Futures” is all over the map literally as well as figuratively. That’s not a complaint. Being all over the map is as such a show should be: Trees are all over the map, too. That the show’s title is plural is as significant as its focus on the future. To purport to be comprehensive about so vast and varied a subject is to be false to that subject. You can’t see the forest for all the trees here, but that’s the point. The more important a subject, and forests are very important, the harder it becomes to summarize it.
“Future Futures” is inventive, unpredictable, enthusiastic, heartfelt. It can also feel scattered and at times confusing. Yet that’s to be expected with a subject of such extreme, and happy, variety. It’s also to be expected when presentation is emphasized over description or even, to an extent, explanation. “Forest Futures” does a lot more showing than telling (even if there is a bit of the latter), and that’s welcome as well as curatorially rare.
Architecture, even landscape architecture, is over fond of jargon and prone to going up its own spout. There are no spouts to be found in “Forest Futures,” other than the kind used in watering. Instead there are roots and branches and bark and leaf canopies and lots and lots of concerned, caring people. No small part of the considerable pleasure this show has to offer is how welcoming it is (those armatures!) and, for lack of a better word, humane. Trees, it must be said, really do bring out the best in people.
FOREST FUTURES
At Druker Design Gallery, Harvard Graduate School of Design, 48 Quincy St., Cambridge, through March 31. 617-495-1000, www.gsd.harvard.edu/exhibitions
Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.