As with much of Oppenheim's earlier work, Trees (From Alternative Landscape Components) act as a dialogue, this time between the natural and artificial landscape and as a comment on the act of creating environments. The first location for this work, the seemingly natural environment of Central Park, was purposefully designed and manipulated by man. Similarly, the Bretton estate, home to YSP's rolling landscape, was originally a carefully designed private pleasure ground and now, as an open-air gallery, provides a contrasting backdrop to Oppenheim's installation. Oppenheim also explores the mechanisms and communication of how artistic ideas are formed - the emotions we experience as the viewer and how involved we become in the work. His work often uses an element of risk or humour in order to fully involve the viewer and communicate his experience of the creative process.

Oppenheim was born in Electric City, Washington State, in 1938 and studied at the California College of Arts and at Stanford University. He was part of the important exhibition Earthworks, considered to have presented land art as a movement for the first time. Curated by Willoughby Sharp at the Dwan Gallery New York, the exhibition featured work by Oppenheim alongside other leading land artists of the 1960s and 1970s such as Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Richard Long and Robert Smithson. Oppenheim made several land art works throughout 1968 and 1969 including Cancelled Crop, a field harvested to form an X shape, and Annual Rings, in which the growth ring pattern of a tree was etched in snow at the United States / Canada border. By 1970 Oppenheim had begun to base work around his body. In Two Jumps For Dead Dog Creek the artist leapt twice over a stream, and for Second Degree Burn he lay in the sun for five hours with an open book on his chest, stating ‘the piece has its roots in a notion of color change, I allowed myself to be painted’.

Towards the end of the 1970s Oppenheim began to produce what he referred to as machine pieces, described as ‘thought collision factories’. In 2006 the Arsenal Gallery in Central Park, New York, opened Alternative Landscape Components: A New Land Art, an exhibition in which Oppenheim constructed highly artificial landscapes from trees, flowers and hedges made in steel, acrylic and household objects. These Trees were part of this exhibition and have recently been shown at Blickachsen 7 in Germany.

This work was generously donated to YSP by the artist before his death in January 2011.