Your words in the fierlight

subject trees

Trees are fascinating indeed -elders of the forest, keepers of the soil, ...and the other half of our respiratory system. What would we do without the intelligence of trees?

I love how quickly trees take over once we humans get out of the way.

Parking lots, abandoned warehouses, solid concrete a meter deep is no match for the power, grace, and beauty of trees. Trees always surface and lay ruin to our ruins.

Look no further than the photographic evidence from Chernobyl.

Trees are happily thriving amongst the destruction of our folly.

Paul D'Arcy

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This series commenced with Tears for Trees which I re-titled after reading your shared stories of grief for beloved trees. The post was coincidently published during the week in which Northumberland lost its most photographed tree, the Sycamore Gap tree.

Julie Gabrielli

expressed the outpouring of feeling on beholding the loss of an old friend ‘reduced to a pile of sawdust’. Also coincidently, a sycamore.

I experienced the same thing when I lived briefly in Philadephia after grad school. My living room of my 2nd-floor flat in an old rowhouse faced the street. Light was filtered by the leaves of a beautiful old sycamore that I befriended. One day, returning from work, I arrived home to find my lovely old friend reduced to a pile of sawdust. I burst into tears right there on the sidewalk. I think of that tree often.

Julie Gabrielli

Sycamore Gap Tree by Dan Monk from the Kielder Observatory: Source

Kimberly Warner

and

Jenna Newell Hiott

expressed their solidarity:

And I walk alongside you in the fits of rage and tears and near brawls when a tree is felled.

Kimberly Warner

This touched me so deeply … I, too, am gutted by careless and unnecessary deaths of trees.

Jenna Newell Hiott

These early comments inspired more stories:

Once, a neighbor cut down a grandmother apple tree. We asked why and she plainly said, “Because it didn’t bear fruit anymore.” My husband and I looked at our 65 year old neighbor and bit our tongues.:)

Kimberly Warner

When my son was six or seven, our neighbor across the street had to take down an old beech tree in her front yard. The parts hoisted on cables by the tree guys looked like an elephant’s foot or a giant woman’s torso. It was wrenching to lose that arching beauty.

Julie Gabrielli

and from

Tara Penry

:

We had a next door neighbor cut down a 60-year oak that shaded half my first house. They were worried about a diseased limb but didn’t call an expert who knew how to preserve the old trees.

What is it with humans and trees?

John Lovie

asked. The senseless felling of the Sycamore Gap tree provoked global grief. But why?

Old, sacred and iconic trees are symbols of stability and constancy in an inconstant world. Human brains love to find patterns in the chaos, to attribute meaning to otherwise disconnected events, and knowledge which enables us to predict what might be coming next. Feeling a sense of order, being able to trust our own experience and knowledge to make informed choices of action, and having a sense of continuity contributes, according to sociologist Anthony Giddens, to a feeling of security - ontological security.

Trees, says Rebecca Banham, as stable and unchanging entities in our world, contribute to ontological security. By engaging with comfortable and familiar objects, people and other beings (e.g. your pets) we gain feelings of safety, trust and reassurance. By looking to the past we can imagine what tomorrow will look like. Trees, which live for so much longer than we do, provide a link between past, present and future.

"You lie under an old myrtle and you just go, 'wow — so what have you seen in your lifetime?' Sh** loads more than me."

Catherine, one of Rebecca Banham’s research participants.

(This made me smile as I planted a myrtle this week. It’s about six inches high.)

If the trees in question had fallen as a result of a storm (like the old linden in our town) it wouldn’t have caused so much grief. This is something that happens naturally. It’s sad, but doesn’t threaten our ontological security. To have a tree deliberately cut down as an act of vandalism, or to make way for a road, or because it doesn’t produce any more … this is a blow to our sense of security and we feel their loss.

I’m not sure I agree with ontological insecurity as an explanation of grief for a tree, but it’s important to acknowledge that people do grieve and perhaps we should respond as if they lost a pet or a loved one, and indeed, suggestions for coping with the loss of beloved tree emerged.

Joyce Wycoff

shared that she once wrote a poem to all the trees she’d known and loved, with one line for each. She said:

The tree poem is like a memory book so I encourage your doing something along that line. And love the idea that's like a tree itself, branching out.

Joyce Wycoff

Trees inspire art in all its forms. Several posts opened with a poem, but the highlight of the series, for me, was the sharing of The Misfit Trees by

Duane Marcus

.

The Misfit Trees

Despite appearances they thrive
Within, around and through their imperfections
They find connection and community in the habitat they share
We can judge them
Pity them
But they don’t want that
Or need that
They are comfortable being just as they are
Because
They are free

Duane Marcus

This week, while clearing the hard-drive on a dying laptop, I discovered the degree to which some of our trees have grown since we first moved into our home, making me feel I should document them more formally.

Lorraine Tilbury

created something similar with a tree that was special to her:

I have a special oak tree growing in a pasture that's a 5mn walk from my house. I've photographed it in all seasons and I had a stylized drawing of it made as a logo for my regulatory consulting business. I felt that it inspired and supported me when I made the jump from a salaried corporate position to my own consulting business in 2013 (10 years ago this year!).

Lorraine Tilbury

The second suggestion for tree grief was so heart-warming it made me want to hug someone. In response to the elephant’s foot or giant woman’s torso of a felled tree, Julie’s son:

.. who at that time loved to draw bare branching trees, made one of them into a condolence card for our neighbor.

Julie Gabrielli

If so much empathy could spring from a seven year old it begs the question of how it is that others can be so immune to the injury they cause.

Humans are so vastly different, I'm often stunned that we are the same species.

Kimberly Warner

and Tara later responded:

It’s like a clue to the ancient character of genetic memory, that some of us count them [trees] as cousins and other humans recognize no relation at all.

Tara Penry

In the last post of the series, I wanted to share this video, entitled The Bipolar Ape but had strayed so far from theme and the point of the post, I held back. It seems poignant now. The age restriction, I believe, is due to references to bonobos’ tendency to make love not war (8 mins):

While establishing that trees talk, a conversation emerged both about the value and dangers of anthropomorphism. Academics who study tree communication have favoured using anthropomorphic language when publishing their findings, which has drawn a lot of criticism from the scientific community. In response, they feel that their anthropomorphic language makes their findings accessible. Their approach has caught the imagination of the public in a way that might affect longer-term behaviour and attitudes towards trees which other environmental studies haven’t. The danger of anthropic tendencies, however, is to forget the otherness of non-human beings:

When we anthropomorphize, we keep ourselves centered and miss how strangely “other” these beings are. In my (very limited) experience, they are not at all like us.

Julie Gabrielli

Leaving us with the ethical dilemma of - to prune or not to prune?

I feel the same as you about pruning things (even house plants). I can't help but think of it as a limb being severed, which would be terribly painful and traumatic. But people who know far more than me assure me it's good for the health of the tree or plant. The trees do look healthier after a pruning so I guess they're right. My thinking of plant stems and tree branches as animal limbs might be an anthropocentric projection on my part. I suppose the next step for me is to learn the language of trees and ask them.

Jenna Newell Hiott

Mid-series we learned there’s actually a profession that considers the relationship between your beliefs and the natural world.

Helen Reynolds

used to be a landscape architecture theoretician. I had to dig a bit deeper into what exactly that is:

The theory is more about why you choose to make certain decisions about your garden (and the wider environment) based on your beliefs about what is the right to manipulate (or not) nature and the natural world.

Helen Reynolds

When considering why it is that some people feel tree loss so keenly and others wilfully destroy, I’m guessing our gardens say a lot about our values.

Louise Haynes

asked:

“How is it possible to bring about the change in values along with a new way of social organization?”

Louise Haynes

While Louise hasn’t seen the necessary shift from consumerist values in her own students, just this morning I learned about a project, not too far from where I live, led by a young Portuguese couple who returned from successful careers in Toronto to live differently. The article describes a trend of younger people seeking communities with a different value system. More on this in the next series!

Dig a hole deep and wide 🕳️

Plant both feet 👣

Bury. 🗻

Relax 🌱

Do this 30/min daily for 10 days

Advice from an Ayurverdic practitioner for allergy sufferers shared by Paul D’Arcy

This advice arose out of the post on the healing powers of being with nature. While the focus of the post was urban green spaces, it led to reminders that walking barefoot, lying on the earth etc. are equally healing. And if your land is like mine or

Jo

’s, covered in acorns and eaten shards, she suggests that when out walking:

… just stop and rest your hand on the bark of a tree.

Jo (reclaiming creativity)

Those researching the healing power of time spent in forests have spent a lot of time in the woods themselves. One senses a value shift as a result of lengthy proximity which makes itself evident in their writing. We are fortunate to have a number of readers who have a deep connection with nature, albeit from different perspectives. While writing this series,

Alexander M Crow

was writing both about trees and sharing his photographs and diary notes of his time away from society living feral in the wilds of Scotland.

… what you say is spot on. The longer I stayed out there, the more entwined I became with all around me. It was as though the mycelium somehow got into my brain, making space for roots of other kinds, all showing me a different way to be.

Alexander M. Crow

And while having this conversation about a different way to be, I can’t leave this series on trees without a mention of stumps. I wrote about an enormous German beech stump which surrounding trees kept alive by pumping nutrients to it. John informed us that the communication works in the opposite direction:

Almost all our forests have been logged. In the first to be logged, huge stumps were left behind. These have become nurse stumps. Seeds of new trees land on them. As they grow, they sink their roots into the decaying wood of the stump. But the nurse stump continues to pump moisture and nutrients to the new tree, picking them up from the fungi and soil surrounding her roots.

John Lovie

Prior to the tree series, Tara shared a link to one of her own personal posts on the magical enchantment of stumps which her father introduced to their plot of land (you’ll find the link in the Community Area/Reasons for Hope).

I was not prepared for the sight of them, towers of grand old growth, notched by old-time logging crews. Three stumps stood separately on the lot, each one like the first house in a new subdivision, waiting for neighbors to give it the look of belonging. From soft, rotted places under the bark, seedlings nosed the air. Standing under them, at last I understood the allure: one part history, one part ecology, one part reparation.

Tara Penry

Time spent with trees, their stumps and their offspring provides insights we might never otherwise have. Before tinkering with our ecology, we first need to know the wisdom our environment holds. Reconnection is key to value transformation.

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Many of your comments expressed appreciation for the content of the post and the writing. I am grateful for this feedback, not so much because I want the validation (though it helps), but to learn what resonates most with readers. In response to one, Joyce said she’d like to use it as a model which I had forgotten about until compiling your comments for this post. It reminded me that I should use it as a model too, as by gauging reactions, it seems to be the approach that captures your imagination the most. I’ll give it a go for the next series.

Before I go, I’d like to leave you with the Smile of the Series:

I’m sorry, I am in a quirky sort of mood and need to ask the question - what is the difference between a dead person and a very dead person? As an ex-nurse I find the idea intriguing. A partially dead person is perhaps only dead on Monday & Tuesday, whereas a very dead person stays mouldering in their grave?

Perhaps we should go back to the old ways, and attach a string to the big toe of a ‘dead’ person, with a bell on the end. Then, if the person was not very dead, they would ring the bell when they had a not-dead-day.

I appreciate ‘very dead’ means they died a long time ago, the sentence just tickled my funny bone.

KateMotleyStories

P.S. New subscribers and shared links and recommendations have been added to the community area:

Introductions: Who’s Who

and here:

Reasons for Hope

These will be updated at the end of every series.