Loneliness is a human invention

Trees are never lonely

All day and night, save winter, every weather,
Above the inn, the smithy, and the shop,
The aspens at the cross-roads talk together
Of rain, until their last leaves fall from the top.

Out of the blacksmith’s cavern comes the ringing
Of hammer, shoe, and anvil; out of the inn
The clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing –
The sounds that for these fifty years have been.

The whisper of the aspens is not drowned,
And over lightless pane and footless road,
Empty as sky, with every other sound
Not ceasing, calls their ghosts from their abode,

A silent smithy, a silent inn, nor fails
In the bare moonlight or the thick-furred gloom,
In tempest or the night of nightingales,
To turn the cross-roads to a ghostly room.

And it would be the same were no house near.
Over all sorts of weather, men, and times,
Aspens must shake their leaves and men may hear
But need not listen, more than to my rhymes.

Whatever wind blows, while they and I have leaves
We cannot other than an aspen be
That ceaselessly, unreasonably grieves,
Or so men think who like a different tree.

In 1915, Edward Thomas wrote Aspen Trees for his friend Robert Frost.

We are Family

Portugal, 2020.

I am listening to garden trees in secret conversation. Their story moves from the top of the land to the bottom like children’s whispers. Oaks dominate the conversation. I am reminded of a moment during childhood, crouched in long grasses communing with the little folk skulking beside me, two elm trees providing much needed shade. I come back to the present. Chickens squawk, and the jangle of goat bells rings from distant fields. The trees continue their story. I scold myself for blatant anthropomorphism and rationalise my observations, “It’s just the sound of the wind in the leaves.”

But wait!

“Of course the trees are talking.”

I close my eyes and visualise the communicative network in the soil between their roots. I bring myself there, a bug beneath the soil, and immediately fall into a deep meditative state. Time stands still, but my hare-brain is surprised by the tortoise mind’s journeying and I open my eyes to be startled by a black redstart hovering like a humming bird about six inches from my nose.

A few days later, I tell a new acquaintance about this experience. “You’ve been welcomed into the family,” he says. I ponder this, not sure if I agree or disagree, then make my way home.

It is my 60th birthday and I sit in the garden with a playful mushroom spirit fascinated by the colourful kaleidoscope geometry of trees. She urges me out of my chair to take a walk with her. We don’t get far. Every few steps, we squat to study a plant, a twig or a stone as if seeing the object for the first time. She has turned me into a child and I find this hilarious. I laugh so hard, I cry. The spirit skips off to who knows where and the oak welcomes me back to paternal arms. I’m with family.

Talking trees are bountiful in literature, the most obvious being the Ents of Lord of the Rings, but don’t forget the weirwoods in the Game of Thrones. In The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino tells the story of Cosimo, a young baron who after an argument with his father, clambers into a garden tree and vows never to come down. There, from the tops of trees, he reads, writes and loves, never setting foot on earth again. Throughout his life, his senses become more finely attuned to the sounds of the woodland, hearing even “the sap running through the cells …” of trees.

I wonder about the trees.
Why do we wish to bear
Forever the noise of these
More than another noise
So close to our dwelling place?
We suffer them by the day
Till we lose all measure of pace,
And fixity in our joys,
And acquire a listening air.
They are that that talks of going
But never gets away;
And that talks no less for knowing,
As it grows wiser and older,
That now it means to stay.
My feet tug at the floor
And my head sways to my shoulder
Sometimes when I watch trees sway,
From the window or the door.
I shall set forth for somewhere,
I shall make the reckless choice
Some day when they are in voice
And tossing so as to scare
The white clouds over them on.
I shall have less to say,
But I shall be gone.

Robert Frost (1916) The Sound of Trees 

Trees speak as oracles in folklore, mythology and legend from the Dodona prophetic oaks of Greek mythology to the legend of a talking tree told by the Yaqui of Mexico, the Italian Streghe’s use of rowan trees for divination and an Ethiopian elm tree which chimed into a conversation between two philosophers.

A resurgence of sentient trees is apparent in more contemporary work. The Island of Missing Trees is partly told from the perspective of a fig tree:

I wish I could have told him that loneliness is a human invention. Trees are never lonely. Humans think they know with certainty where their being ends and someone else's starts. With their roots tangled and caught up underground, linked to fungi and bacteria, trees harbour no such illusions. For us, everything is interconnected.
Elif Shafaq (2021) The Island of Missing Trees

and Richard Powers through weaving a series of fables provides a door into the vast interconnected world of trees:

We found that trees could communicate, over the air and through their roots. Common sense hooted us down. We found that trees take care of each other. Collective science dismissed the idea. Outsiders discovered how seeds remember the seasons of their childhood and set buds accordingly. Outsiders discovered that trees sense the presence of other nearby life. That a tree learns to save water. That trees feed their young and synchronize their masts and bank resources and warn kin and send out signals to wasps to come and save them from attacks. Here’s a little outsider information, and you can wait for it to be confirmed. A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware.

Richard Powers (2019) The Overstory

Trees Talk

While science might chastise the anthropomorphic statement “trees talk” perhaps we instead need to reimagine our egocentric view. Is it only humans that speak to each other? The need for language to be able to talk is an erroneous and unethical assumption. By denying that plants have the ability to communicate with each other, we deny their kinship and social connection. And as we will see in the next edition of this letter, the world of trees is both familial and highly social. With anthropic thinking, however, we afford them the possibility of a spirit not unlike our own, and if they are like us, they are therefore of worth. To talk to a tree is to endow it with respect or to give it the gift of love. We are unlikely to take an axe or a bulldozer to something we have come to love.

Out of a science of trees has arisen a philosophy of trees. One that turns anthropocentric attitudes to trees on its head and questions the ethics of treating a forest as a material resource. What is noticeable in researchers’ accounts of the life of talking trees is the culture change in how they communicate their findings. They have shifted from objective scientific language to a more ethically anthropic account. In hearing the voices of trees, they begin to acutely listen and take on board their wisdom.

Immersion in the natural world is a process of attunement. In

Alexander M Crow

’s continuing series The Fall in Time of his pilgrimage into the wilds of Scotland, far from the madding crowd, I am struck by how, apart from the practicalities of living wild as the wintry season approaches, he becomes less an external observer of nature, but more an integral being in commune with the environment.

Winter felt like she was whispering and the deer, hoarse roaring and frantic clashing, seemed to agree, their urgency raising tempo and decibels both.

David George Haskell is a researcher who studies tree acoustics. He relates both his subjective experience and the objective science of bioacoustics in his book The Songs of Trees. He expresses a sonic experience which emphasises the connectivity of nature, of which we are not separate, but irrevocably entwined.

As the sounds of foraging birds tumble from the highest part of the trees, clinks and jangles emerge from the ground. A ruffed grouse struts out of a thicket of balsam fir and spruce seedlings. The bird’s steps are fox silent on the needles, and then crackle as its feet pass over the trail. My own footfall is like the grind and punch of walking on a sidewalk strewn with shattered glass. Even tree roots evoke sound. The swell of growing roots causes shards of rocks to click, a sound so quiet and soil-muffled that I detected it only with a probe nestled into the rocky ground. The brush of a fingertip on the probe is a roar compared with the tick of rocks nudged by roots. Some botanists suggest that the quiet sounds made by roots stimulate plant growth, but these claims are controversial. Too few human ears have attended to the soil’s chatter, and experimental evidence is ambiguous.

However, more human ears are listening. With advances in technology and artificial intelligence, the sounds of plants are providing global data which is helping to track ecological systems in a more holistic manner than has been previously achieved.

Scientists interested in how trees talk have been heavily criticised, not so much for the actual findings, but for the way they have been communicated. Academia isn’t quite ready to exchange its human-centric orientation for anthropic, ethical regard. I feel a sea-change a-coming, and perhaps a paradigm shift is nigh?

The Wood-Wide Web

I’m in a redwood forest in Santa Cruz, California, taking dictation for the trees outside my cabin. They speak constantly, even if quietly, communicating above - and underground using sound, scents, signals and vibes. They’re naturally networking, connected with everything that exists, including you.

Ephrat Livni (2017)

Up Next

Next week, I will delve into the science of the multi-varied ways in which trees communicate, both above and below the ground. The week after, we will put Livni’s proposition to the test. Are we really a part of the wood-wide web?

Embers

Herman Hesse has written the most beautiful passages on the human-tree connection and what we can learn from them.

Poetic Outlaws

shared a wonderful passage from Hesse’s book, Wandering: Notes and Sketches which is a good follow-up to the words quoted above.

Trees are Sanctuaries

Beyond The Fiertzeside

Marder, M. The Ethics of ‘Talking Trees’ https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-ethics-of-talking-trees/

P.S. Writing this letter was interspersed with an olive harvest between showers and even a storm (in which a lot of olives were lost). The more I read and the more I wrote, the more I asked the olive trees for permission to pluck their fruit from their delicate branches. It was torture, probably for all parties concerned, to employ the pruning saw. I felt a bit better when my partner’s reaction to their haircuts was “they seem happier.” I don’t yet speak tree. I hope he’s right.