This is a small project of mine. I took the public tree census of Paris and turned it into twenty posters, one for each arrondissement. Every one of the 176,193 trees in the census is drawn once, as a single small mark, and nothing more.
Nothing on the sheets is invented. Where a tree stands, how tall it is, how thick its trunk, which family it belongs to: all of it comes from the city’s own record, and the drawing is just a way of looking at that record all at once.
©2026
Twenty sheets, one tree at a time, each drawn where it grows.
How it works
Each mark sits where the real tree stands, with north kept upward. Its length follows the tree’s height, its thickness the girth of the trunk, and its colour the botanical family. Trees the city classes as remarkable get a small ring.
On top of that you can add some weather: a breeze or a gale that bends the strokes, a current that combs the whole district one way, or a vortex that turns around its centre. You can also switch on canopy contours and wind streams underneath the marks. Everything is seeded, so the same settings always draw the same sheet, and nothing invents a tree that is not in the data.
The data
The trees come from the “Les arbres” dataset on Paris Open Data, downloaded July 2026. It covers the trees the city manages: streets, parks, cemeteries and schools, not private courtyards.
The Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes are counted separately and are not on these sheets. Some trees have no height or girth recorded; those are drawn at a modest default size, and each poster’s footer says how many.
Why not a map
There are no streets, no river and no boundaries on the sheets. Avenues still show up as lines of trees and parks as dense clouds, but the shape of each arrondissement comes only from where its trees happen to stand.