Nature lovers making their way through Seattle’s Westlake Park or taking a leisurely stroll along the Burke-Gilman Trail are likely stopping, staring and scratching their heads at this very moment. Gazing up at the honey locusts and birches, they might wonder, “Am I imagining this?” No. Those trees really are blue.

Artist Konstantin Dimopoulos paints trees with a ‘biologically safe pigmented water’ to make a statement about how important trees are to our survival. The color will naturally degrade over a period of months. Seattle’s trees turned color on April 2nd, 2012, and will likely remain that way through the summer.

Dimopoulos previously gave trees the Smurf treatment for the 2011 Vancouver Biennale. Other locations have included Richmond, Virginia and Melbourne in the artist’s home country of Australia. Seattle’s 4Culture organization, which is backing the project, says that it’s meant to “inspire discussion and action around deforestation issues.”

“Colour is a powerful stimulant, a means of altering perception and defining space and time,” says Dimopoulos. “The fact that blue is a colour that is not naturally identified with trees suggests to the viewer that something unusual, something out of the ordinary has happened. It becomes a magical transformation. In nature colour is used both as a defensive mechanism, a means of protection, and as a mechanism to attract. The Blue Trees attempts to waken a similar response from viewers. It is within this context that the blue denotes sacredness, something reverential.”

Some forms of sculpture take a bit more patience than others. Plant shaping and bonsai pruning are two examples of art that takes years. With patience comes permanence, however, as a properly shaped plant will impress generations.

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Shaped trees are most often manicured for decorative purposes only, but they can also be made functional. By carefully guiding a plant’s growth around metal support beams, small buildings can be constructed out of a living frame.

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A gorgeous, organic fluidity makes these plants perfect example of the highest end of the bonsai art spectrum. Carefully shaped and pruned to be gorgeous microcosms of nature, they are living art.

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Some shaped plants are more complicated than others, but all require a level of patience beyond the limit of the average person.

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The artist Takanori Aiba creates fantastic epoxy bonsais and artwork that are realistic enough to seem totally believable, but wild enough to keep one inspecting the artistic details for hours.

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Pooktre is a company that shapes plants into furniture and fantastic designs. Some of the plants are harvested for pre-shaped furniture, while others are meant to remain as living artwork.

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Bonsai trees can be formed into an incredible variety of shapes and sizes. These examples vary wildly in terms of their overall design.

(Images via crashbonsai)

For those who don’t take the art of bonsai as seriously as others, Crash Bonsai is a company that feels the same way. Crash Bonsai creates highly realistic car models that have had a minor accident… the perfect accoutrement to that bonsai tree.

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Who says a bonsai can’t have any color? These examples show the range of appearances these versatile plants can take on.

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The art of bonsai has been around for thousands of years and its popularity is only growing. There is something powerful about shaping nature to fit one’s design, while also learning to have patience and a gentle hand.

If trees could play music, what would it sound like? That may seem like a silly question, but artist Bartholomäus Traubeck has found a way to answer it. The appropriately titled ‘Years’ project translates the rings of tree slices into piano music using a vintage turntable, a Playstation Eye Camera and a computer running the software ‘Ableton Live‘.

YEARS from Bartholomäus Traubeck on Vimeo.

The effect, as you can hear in the video above, is surprisingly somber and haunting. The German-born artist, who divides his time between Rotterdam, Netherlands and Linz, Austria, explains that the music software reads the rings as they shift and change and translates that raw sound into a pre-selected musical sound – in this case, piano.

“A tree’s year rings are analysed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music. It is mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appearance of the wood (ranging from dark to light and from strong texture to light texture). The foundation for the music is certainly found in the defined ruleset of programming and hardware setup, but the data acquired from every tree interprets this ruleset very differently.”