AS JONATHON TELLS IT, the tree-art project originated while he was on the forested coast of Westport Island, Maine, during a six-week fellowship paid for by the MacNamara Foundation. One day he saw something unusual through his cabin's window: spruce trees blowing in the wind.

"They were sensitive to their surroundings in ways that any artist I've ever known would envy," he says, "but none of the trees were getting residencies."

So he dug up a sapling, potted it in his studio, and performed some early experiments in getting trees to draw. The sapling-pencil trial happened to coincide with Jonathon reading a book called The Last Folk Hero, a look at the contemporary folk-art scene by Andrew Dietz, a 44-year-old Atlanta resident who published it while running his own marketing-strategies firm. The Last Folk Hero chronicles the lives of several prominent folk artists and their dealers, making the argument that what we call folk art—naive, often rural art done without the influence of popular culture—is disappearing. Even the toothless quack building hubcap pyramids way out in the country has lost his naïveté. Mass media has made folk artists aware of their commercial potential, so now they tailor their folksiness to what buyers seem to want. Every artist is a sellout to some degree. No one is authentic.

Except for trees, Jonathon thought. They were true outsiders, incorruptible in their non-sentience. Why not make them artists?

Jonathon got in touch with Andrew, whom he knew only through his book, and they decided to launch a movement called Agrifolk Art.

Despite Andrew's insistence that Agrifolk is an original artistic wave "on the order of Impressionism," it has obvious similarities to animal art, a movement that, since the mid-1970s, has been anchored at the Museum of Non-Primate Art (monpa.com), near Chichester, England. There, zoologists and art historians have collected samples of "elephant art" (trunk drawings in dust), "cat art" (paw paintings), "stallion art" (beautiful dung piles), and "bird art" (blobs of "ornithological dejecta").

But no tree art. So there was still territory left to be explored. Jonathon found the Kinsey Family Farm on Google, and Andrew convinced the Kinseys to let 50 of the trees get artsy for a weekend. Andrew ordered $2,000 worth of art supplies, while Jonathon sent out a press release to pump up the theoretical backstory. ("Research Reveals That Visual Artists Perform Photosynthesis," it blared.) Andrew, a nice guy who's considerably slicker than Jonathon, saw some profit potential, so he lined up Atlanta's Soho Myriad Gallery for a mid-October show. Atlanta-based Eyekiss Films signed on to shoot a documentary. And Andrew agreed to pay Jonathon $2,500, fly him to Georgia, and share 20 percent of the gallery sales, which he believed could be considerable. He estimated that the first museum piece might fetch up to $50,000.

Everything was lined up—except, of course, the weather. And this became the first obstacle to seeing much of anything.