Seven Years of Light: How Aaron and Fluora Have Been Building Living Trees

This year marks seven years since Aaron and a handful of collaborators built their first LED tree together. It was 2017, and the group was working under the banner of Symmetry Labs. Nobody expected it to turn into what it has become.

They built it because it seemed like a fun, slightly ridiculous thing to try. What they didn't anticipate was how deeply it would resonate. Something about putting light and electronics into a natural, towering form factor struck a chord with people in a way none of them saw coming.

"We built it because it seemed like a fun, slightly ridiculous thing to try. What we didn't expect was how much it would resonate."

Over the years, the team has watched people from all over the world interact with these trees. Holiday mall visitors in West Palm Beach, Florida, gathered around a Christmas light show displayed on one. A group of strangers lay under the glow of another at Firefly Music Festival in Delaware, looking up through the branches like they were somewhere else entirely.

The People Who Make It Possible

A significant part of what makes Fluora's work possible is the network of fabricators and collaborators who have grown alongside the studio. Chief among them are Calli and the team at Stark Raven Fab, who Aaron describes as giving Fluora superpowers. They handle the most complex fabrication and installation work: the parts of the tree that require precision, experience, and a willingness to spend long days up in a boom lift installing electrical systems and LEDs into individual branches.

"We've spent plenty of late nights under the glow of the tree," Aaron says. "And long days up in a boom lift. It's physical, demanding work. But there's something about being that close to the thing you're building that never gets old."

The Trees Themselves

Each tree Fluora builds is its own project, its own set of engineering challenges, its own aesthetic logic. The Wishing Tree, completed in 2019, drew inspiration from the Banyan tree, with its cascading aerial roots and sense of ancient permanence. Nebari, built in 2021, took the Japanese Maple as its reference point, a more delicate structure, more intricate in its branching, more intimate in its scale.

Then there is the Parkville tree, the largest art installation Fluora has ever built. At 42 feet tall, constructed from steel, with over 60,000 LEDs embedded across 6,500 individual leaves, it is a genuinely staggering object. The kind of thing that stops people mid-step. One of Fluora's favorite installs, Aaron notes, ended up in someone's living room, a reminder that these trees exist across a remarkable range of contexts and scales.

"A 42-foot steel tree with over 60,000 LEDs embedded in 6,500 leaves. The kind of thing that stops people mid-step."

The Kelowna Treehouse, completed in 2024, represents another chapter in that evolution: a tree integrated into an architectural context, living inside a structure rather than standing apart from it.

Still Making Things

What strikes you most about Fluora's story is not the scale of the work, though the scale is genuinely impressive. It's the continuity. The same artists, designers, and engineers who worked on the very first tree in 2017 are still in the room. Still making LED art, despite everything that has happened in the world and in their personal lives in the years between.

There are more trees in the works for 2026. Aaron isn't saying much about them yet. But if the last seven years are any indication, they will be worth the wait.