There is something almost involuntary about the impulse. You stand before a tree, you have a piece of paper and a small length of string, and without quite knowing why, you feel certain that if you write the right words and tie them carefully to the right branch, something will shift. A burden will lift. A door will open.
This is the logic of the wishing tree — and it is ancient.
A Ritual Older Than Writing
Archaeologists and anthropologists have documented variations of the wishing tree practice across an astonishing range of cultures and time periods. In Japan, wooden ema plaques bearing written prayers have been hung at Shinto shrines for over a millennium. In Scotland and Ireland, the clootie well tradition involves tying strips of cloth to trees near healing springs — each strip representing a wish or a prayer for recovery. In parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, sacred trees wrapped in coloured ribbons still mark places where the boundary between the ordinary and the extraordinary feels thin.
What these traditions share is a belief in the externalization of intention — the idea that giving a wish physical form, attaching it to something rooted and alive, changes its nature. The wish stops being merely private. It enters the world. It becomes, in some sense, real.
"A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality."
Yoko Ono and the Conceptual Turn
Yoko Ono first created a Wish Tree in 1996. The piece asked visitors to write a wish on a small tag and tie it to the branches of a living tree placed in the gallery space. The gesture was simple — deliberately so. Ono has long been interested in art that requires participation to exist at all, art that is completed not by the artist but by the audience.
The Wish Tree belongs to a lineage of works she calls instruction pieces: artworks defined by a simple directive that the audience is asked to carry out. Earlier examples include Grapefruit (1964), a book of instructions — "Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put them in." — and Cut Piece (1964), in which audience members were invited to cut away pieces of the artist's clothing. In each case, the work only exists in its execution. The audience is not optional. The audience is the work.
With the Wish Tree, this participatory logic reaches its most universal form. Anyone can participate. No artistic skill is required. The only material is language, the most democratic medium of all.
The Imagine Peace Tower
What sets Ono's Wish Tree apart from its predecessors is what happens to the collected wishes. Every wish tied to every installation is eventually gathered and sent to the Imagine Peace Tower on Viðey Island in Iceland. Inaugurated in October 2007 on what would have been John Lennon's 67th birthday, the tower is a column of light that shoots fifteen beams skyward from a wishing well engraved with the words "Imagine Peace" in 24 languages.
To date, the tower holds over ten million wishes from people in more than one hundred countries. The sheer scale of this archive — millions of individual hopes, preserved in a specific place, under a specific light — transforms the intimate act of wishing into something approaching a collective monument.
The Digital Chapter: A Webby Award and a Website
In 2024, the Wish Tree project entered a new phase when wishtreeforyoko.com received a Technical Achievement Webby Award. The award recognized the website's capacity to translate the spatial, tactile experience of the physical installation into a digital environment — one that could reach participants who would never stand in front of a gallery tree.
The challenge is genuinely difficult. The physical Wish Tree works partly through presence: you are there, in a specific space, surrounded by the accumulated wishes of everyone who came before you. You feel the weight of the tags already on the branch. You smell the gallery, or the park, or the museum courtyard. The act of tying your own wish is embedded in a sensory context that digital interfaces cannot replicate.
And yet the digital Wish Tree succeeded — not by simulating the physical experience, but by finding what the internet does uniquely well: scale, reach, accessibility, and the quiet solidarity of knowing that right now, somewhere else, someone is also reaching for a branch.
Why This Matters Now
The endurance of the wishing tree across cultures and centuries suggests something important about how human beings relate to hope. We are not content to keep our wishes entirely interior. We want to give them form. We want them witnessed — even if only by a tree, even if only by strangers who will tie their own tags to the same branch and never know what ours said.
In an era when digital tools allow us to create, share, and archive almost anything, the wishing tree reminds us that some of the most meaningful forms of expression are also the simplest: a thought, a piece of paper, a knot. The technology changes. The impulse does not.
Explore more in the journal: Online Tools That Help Artists Bring Their Vision to Life and How to Create a Digital Wish Tree for Your Community.