THE lawn of Oxford’s Museum of Natural History will be transformed next month to become home to a haunting art installation.

The creation of artist Angela Palmer, the Ghost Forest comprises 10 gigantic tree stumps – weighing up to 15 tonnes each – brought from the rainforests of Western Ghana.

It will be in Oxford for a year following previous displays in London’s Trafalgar Square and in a square in the centre of Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark.

Ms Palmer, who lives in North Oxford, said the aim of the work was to raise awareness about the threat of deforestation.

“I just thought it would be the most powerful thing to bring a rainforest to the west and confront people with the choices they are making,” she said.

“It’s about showing and not telling, I suppose.

“It’s to prompt people to think and reflect about our natural resources and the rate we’re destroying them.

“An area of rainforest the size of a football pitch is destroyed every four seconds.”

The tree stumps are from Ghana’s Suhuma forest. Three were trees that had been felled, as part of a selective logging operation, and seven had toppled over during storms.

Moving 10 huge tree stumps, complete with their roots, to the UK was not without its complications.

The largest stump, from a denya tree, prompted a special ceremony – called the pouring of the libation – performed to invoke the river goddess Suhuma.

Ms Palmer added: “The largest tree wouldn’t come out of the forest, so the locals got suspicious and performed the ceremony.”

And that was just the start of a major logistical operation that included a 48-hour cleaning process to satisfy UK Customs officers and tested the combined expertise of advisers from Oxford University’s department of engineering when the stumps were unloaded from a ship at Tilbury docks, in East London.

The installation was first shown in Trafalgar Square last November before being moved to Copenhagen in December, to coincide with the UN conference on climate change.

At present, the stumps are being stored at Hull docks, in Yorkshire, waiting to start their journey to Oxford.

A crane will be needed to lift the trees into place at the front of the Museum of Natural History, in Parks Road.

The stumps will be mounted on specially-designed sustainable concrete plinths, which bears plaques detailing the history and origin of each of the trees they came from.

The Ghost Forest installation will be in Oxford for a year after its official unveiling.

For more details of the installation, see ghostforest.org