Trees. Anything but passive

I finished Lynda Mapes' Witness Tree last week, her 2017 book documenting over a year's worth of close observation of an old oak tree in the Harvard Forest. Her premise is simple: use a century-old tree as the main character in a story of ecological change. Mapes even has the charm of history on her side as the term "witness tree" recalls surveyors' early practice of using trees as boundary markers for the dividing up of natural landscapes.

I'm in the throes of choosing and planting trees in a few places on our land, and have been looking more closely at the existing trees. One, an elm, is my favorite. It's not as old as Mapes' oak, but in the two years that I have been on this land it has grown significantly. It has a beautiful, umbrella-like shape, typical of elms, is shelter for numerous birds, insects and small rodents, and probably an array of other things that I haven't fully observed, such as snakes, frogs, moss and fungi. This elm also catches everyone's eye—not because it's the biggest, or most exotic, tree on our many acres, but perhaps because it's the most inviting. It looks like shelter. It invites repose.

Mapes, who is a science writer at The Seattle Times, offers so much in her book. One of her chapters, "To Know a Tree," brings me to a new understanding. In describing her own deepening perception of trees, she reminds us that they're woody perennial plants, and as such, "they demonstrate the agency of the stationary."

They are rooted in place and shaped by events around them: the growth of neighboring trees, prevailing winds, weather. But they are not passive. Trees manipulate their environment, exuding chemicals to deter pests and call in predators. They make soil, alter the hydrologic cycle, climate, atmosphere and habitat. Trees move, breathe, operate a whole-body circulatory system, eat, have sex, communicate, expel waste, socialize, wage war, compete, cooperate and create. Would that any of us could be as creative, productive and responsive to our world, day in and day out, year unfailingly after year, with the quiet finesse of any tree.

They are not passive. No.

In the next few weeks, we will be planting a dozen or so trees. They main purpose of this planting is to create privacy along a county road that borders us, and also break the wind as it comes from the west on our hilltop. The characters are ones you know: Norway spruce, white pine, maybe some black hills spruce, along with some river birch nestled in. The deliberate planting of trees makes me wonder how the trees that we select "relate" to one another, more than just in human aesthetic and functional terms.

It reminds me that Peter Wohlleben, a German forester whose book, The Hidden Life of Trees, challenges our assumptions about what trees are capable of, and how we get them wrong. His book emphasizes Mapes' point that trees are anything but passive. Wohlleben describes how trees nurture one another--whether by "suckling" their offspring, helping their sick neighbors, or forming "special friendships."

Just today, I saw two old beeches standing next to each other. Each one was growing its branches turned away from one another rather than toward each other, as is more usually the case. In this way and others, tree friends take care of each other. This kind of partnership is well known to foresters. They know that if you see such a couple, they are really like a human couple; you have to chop down both if you chop down one, because the other will die anyway.

I cite Wohlleben because his observations about trees based on decades spent caring for forests give us the means to look at them in ways that we haven't before. His perspective is the macro to Mapes' close read of one tree. Both writers aim to prod us toward looking at trees in new ways if we are to overcome, as Mapes puts it, "the greatest unintended consequence in human history," climate change. Mapes reminds us that "pastures grown back to forests have emerged as important ecological assets for capturing carbon dioxide out of the air as they consume carbon in photosynthesis." Carbon sinks, as they're called.

At another spot, I'm planting three metasequoias, a type of redwood once thought to be extinct. They do well in our climate. I don't know if I'm getting it right, but I am talking to people who know more about trees than I do. I'm trying to make thoughtful choices. I'm definitely not cutting any existing trees down. I'm looking at my old pastures differently, too, imagining what it would be like if some of them turned to forest again.

Mapes ends her book on a note of hope: "people and trees are meant to be together, and if we work at it, that's how we'll stay." But she also cautions us that if we don't "the planet will go on with or without us, with new suites of life emerging long after we perhaps are gone, or at least greatly diminished."