ON: The Dreams of Trees

For Earth Day

Song of the Week: “To Build a Home,” by The Cinematic Orchestra and Patrick Watson - “I climbed the tree to see the world.”

In 2013, Melbourne, Australia’s Urban Forest and Ecology Team created an interactive map, the “Urban Forest Visual,” of the city’s more than 70,000 trees. Users could select any tree on the map and see data about its genus and age, as well as an unusual piece of information: its email address. 

The team provided each tree with a unique email address because they hoped that people would use the system to report tree health problems, vandalism, or other concerns. What they did not expect is that love letters to the trees would pour in from across the city and around the world - over 10,000 in the first eight years after the program was launched.

A golden elm on Punt Road, Melbourne’s most emailed tree

Some of the love letters were simple. “Hi Tree,” one person wrote, “You are just outside my work and you make me happy :) Keep growing and keep on treeing!” 

“How do you feel about those trees who are hugged by koalas all day?” asked another, who signed their email “Not-a-koala.” 

Other residents shared more poignant sentiments: one writer connected the indigenous “Moreton Bay Fig” to Australia’s history of colonization. “You are my favorite tree because you are a native,” they write, concluding that “you remind me to be as strong and beautiful as you are.”  

People from outside Australia - many who had not even visited Melbourne - also wrote letters to the trees: “Hello, dear Tree,” reads one message. “I read about this wonderful project and suppose to write you from another side of Earth - Russia. I hope you have a good care and don’t sick. One day we will meet, may be.” 

In my favorite of the emails, one addressed to “Syzygium Lilly-Pilly,” a Colorado teen who has stayed up past midnight confides in the tree about his dreams and anxieties regarding a potential career as an artist. “I’ll write again, soon, I think,” he concludes. “I would quite like to have a tree as a friend.”

Tree of Life

These love letters from around the world speak to the near universality of trees as natural and cultural symbols. They are present in most religions and myths, from Yggdrasil in Norse mythology to the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in Genesis. 

We also indelibly associate trees with different regions, nations, and institutions, from George Washington’s cherry tree to the African baobab, Athena’s olive tree to the coconut palm of Polynesia. 

I theorize that the great appeal of trees across cultures is their scale, both in size and in time. Unlike most other plants and animals, trees routinely outlive us, and their often staggering size leaves us feeling small.

Modern scientists recognize trees as the cornerstone of terrestrial life: trees clean our air, produce 28% of the world’s oxygen, prevent erosion, and provide shelter for other plants and animals. Today, there are more than 64,000 known species of trees, and more than three trillion trees worldwide. That being said, scientists and archaeologists estimate that in the last 12,000 years, the number of trees has decreased by 46%, as a result of agriculture, industry, and climate change.

Trees are at the heart of many of the Earth’s diverse ecosystems, perhaps most famously its tropical rainforests, which are home to 40-75% of all species globally. You can explore the uniqueness of some of these ecosystems, by the way - and rest your mind for a moment - through the soundscapes provided by Tree.fm, which features audio recorded in the world’s forests.

The Giving Tree

For many children, the first anthropomorphized tree they encounter is in The Giving Tree, by poet Shel Silverstein. In this 1964 picture book, an apple tree gives more and more of herself to a boy throughout her life. At first, the boy takes joy in the tree, eating her apples and swinging from her branches, and “the Tree was happy.”

As the boy grows into a man, however, he returns to the tree again and again with more and more materialistic desires, eventually selling her apples, building a house from her branches, and cutting down her trunk to build a boat. After each irrevocable sacrifice, we are told, “the Tree was happy.”

The Giving Tree is one of the most successful - and the most divisive - children’s books in history. A 1995 issue of the religion journal First Things invited scholars to discuss interpretations of the story. In his introduction, professor William F. May provides a harsh reading of The Giving Tree, one in which “a compulsive giver fatally bonds with a predatory taker.” He reads the boy as simultaneous ungrateful son and extractive capitalist:

If…one thinks of the tree as the motherly feminine or as a symbol for the whole of nature, the shadows lengthen into a bleak morality tale about an oblivious male chauvinism or about an environmentally destructive anthropocentrism, both ominously foretold when, early on, the boy gathers leaves and weaves them into a crown and struts about playing king of the forest, his nose lifted high in the air.

Amy A. Kass, meanwhile, chooses to read The Giving Tree more compassionately, imagining the Tree as embodying the tireless and profound love of a mother:

She knows, probably from the beginning, that the life she will nourish must cost her her own, and she anticipates necessity by giving her young child everything most needful, trusting that a happy and loving childhood will see him through the sorrows and pains of tomorrow.

As for me? While I love the art, I have always found The Giving Tree depressing, even as a young child. 

What does it say about our society that we ask mothers to give of themselves tirelessly, thanklessly, and joyously? 

If we imagine trees - and the earth - as happily giving, and giving, and giving to us and expecting nothing in return, how long can those gifts be sustained?

Nobody Cares for the Woods

A few years before Shel Silverstein gave us the self-destructively generous Giving Tree, J. R. R. Tolkien painted a far different picture of trees.

Tolkien famously adored trees: he was apparently annoying to go on walks with, because he would stop and admire each individual tree along the route.¹

In a 1955 letter to the Houghton Mifflin Company. he wrote, “I am obviously much in love with plants and above all trees, and always have been; and I find human maltreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill-treatment of animals.” Decades later, in a 1972 letter to the Daily Telegraph, he concluded that “in all my works, I take the part of trees as against all their enemies.”

Tolkien’s love for trees was the central pillar in an overarching ecological vision that pervaded his writing and his life. As Matthew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans write in their book Ents, Elves and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of Tolkien (2006), Tolkien uses Middle Earth to communicate an ecological vision with “a strong philosophical and theological basis, a comprehensive imaginative picture of what it might look like when worked out, a powerful reminder of what life looks like when that vision is rejected, and practical implications for day-to-day life for us all (xvi).”

In Tolkien’s works, trees are ancient, beautiful, and powerful: deserving of respect and - if mistreated - a healthy amount of fear. Bilbo celebrates his birthday beneath the Party Tree, and the elves of Lothlorien build their wondrous homes high in the branches of the ancient mallorn trees.

All of Tolkien’s most admirable characters are lovers and stewards of the environment: the valiant Samwise Gamgee is a gardener, the peace-loving Faramir wishes to “see the White Tree in flower again” and “dwell in fair Ithilien,” and Tom Bombadil is “Master of wood, water, and hill,” though “the trees and the grasses and all things growing or living in the land belong each to themselves.”

Without a doubt, however, Tolkien’s most powerful advocate for trees is - well, emphatically not a tree himself, but rather, a tree-herder or tree-shepherd - the ent Treebeard.

Treebeard, who rescues and protects Merry and Pippin when they are lost in Fangorn Forest, is a giant, ancient, tree-like creature who speaks very, very slowly, recites long poems and songs (some of his own composition)², and takes care of the woods.³ “I am not altogether on anybody’s side, because nobody is altogether on my side, if you understand me,” he tells the hobbits. “Nobody cares for the woods as I care for them, not even Elves nowadays” 

While Treebeard and his fellow ents are initially reluctant to involve themselves in the War of the Ring, they are eventually driven to intervene by their rage at the wizard Saruman’s wanton destruction of the environment. “He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as they serve him for the moment,” Treebeard says of Saruman.

Peter Jackson powerfully depicts the moment when Treebeard realizes the extent of Saruman’s deforestation:

“Many of these trees were my friends,” he groans. “Creatures I had known from nut and acorn. They had voices of their own.” Then Treebeard howls wordlessly, calling his fellow ents to war in what he fears will be “the last march of the ents.”

Despite Treebeard’s pessimism, however, what follows is a cathartic scene in which the ents dismantle the charnel pits and furnaces of Saruman’s fortress Isengard, release the river from its dam, and serve the wizard his just deserts for the desecration he has wrought upon the landscape.

As the ents stand steady in the rushing waters, Treebeard declares that “the filth of Saruman is washing away. Trees will come back to live here. Young trees. Wild trees.” 

In Tolkien’s imagining, trees do not give and give forever to those who do not appreciate their gifts. Tolkien’s trees fight back.

Intelligence

I’ve always loved the image of Tolkien’s sentient trees, but for a long time I dismissed it as the stuff of fantasy. Recently, however, research has emerged showing that - while trees may not write poetry or seek revenge - they may still be communicating with each other.

In the 2016 RadioLab episode “From Tree to Shining Tree,” hosts Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad interview Canadian scientist Suzanne Simard about the secret communication of trees: communication that takes place beneath the ground, on a microscopic level.

Scientists have dubbed this network “The Wood Wide Web”

Simard explains how, within forests, trees are connected across vast subterranean networks through their root systems, with certain “mother trees” serving as hubs connecting dozens of individual trees. These trees are able to connect to other trees through a symbiotic relationship with fungi that grow on their roots, consuming sugar produced by the tree in exchange for minerals “gathered” by the fungi.

These fungi are also able to aid in distributing resources - and, it would seem, messages - throughout the forest. If individual trees are injured or sickened, they can send messages to other trees warning them of potential threats. And, if they’re on the brink of death, especially from environmental factors, they can potentially “dump their carbon into their neighbors,” Simard says.

Krulwich explains that this carbon redistribution seems outright strategic: rather than just giving their carbon to their nearby descendents or trees of the same species, “the food ends up very often with trees that are new in the forest and better at surviving global warming. It’s as if the individual trees were somehow thinking ahead to the needs of the whole forest.”

This networked behavior has led scientists to consider using a powerful term to describe these forests: intelligence.

“It’s almost as if the forest is acting as an organism itself,” Simard says. “You know, they talk about how honeybee colonies are sort of super organisms, because each individual bee is sort of acting like it’s a cell in a larger body. Once you understand that the trees are all connected to each other, they’re all signaling each other, sending food and resources to each other, it has the feel, the flavor of something very similar.”

Even as scientists work to understand how heterogenous forests might collectively “think,” they’re also working to understand trees that further blur the distinction between the individual organism and the collective: clonal colonies.

Many trees can reproduce asexually, creating genetically identical copies of themselves - clones - allowing them to live for an extraordinarily large amount of time. 

The oldest and largest of these clonal colonies is also the oldest and largest known organism on Earth: an organism named “Pando” (Latin for “I spread”). 

Pando is a clonal colony of over 47,000 genetically identical quaking aspen trees all sprouting individually from one enormous root system covering 106 acres in central Utah. Altogether, it weighs an estimated 13.2 million pounds.

While the individual trees within Pando each live around 100-130 years, the entire organism is estimated to be a staggering 14,000 years old. 

Though Pando may be the earth’s oldest living organism, we only became aware of it in the 1970s - and soon after the discovery, we learned that humans were its greatest threat. Drought, fire, and deforestation caused by industry and agriculture may impede Pando’s future flourishing.

In 2019, concerned scientists and amateur naturalists founded Friends of Pando, a non-profit devoted to protecting the tree, furthering research, and educating the public. 

“Just as Pando is one tree that spread its roots widely,” they declare on their About page, “Friends of Pando works to foster collaboration, working with all who demonstrate a sincere commitment to a future where Pando is understood and thrives.”

Voices of Their Own

It is an irony that has appeared before in this newsletter, and I am sure it will appear again and again: humans are the greatest threat to life on this planet, but we are also its greatest advocate and ally.

Trees may take care of each other, but so many of us humans are also devoted to taking care of them. It is not for nothing that, for years, environmentalists were pejoratively referred to as “tree-huggers.” We want to be their friends.

Even though the evidence suggests trees might function best as collective organisms, we still insist on thinking of them as individuals. One of the most charming examples of this is the American Live Oak Society, which was founded in 1934 to advance the preservation and appreciation of southern live oaks. By its founding laws, the Live Oak Society is allowed only one human member, its honorary chairman, who is responsible for registering and keeping records of the other arboreal members. The only requirement for membership is that an oak must have a trunk circumference of 8 feet or more. Today, there are over 7,000 registered members of the society. 

The president of the Society, by the way? The largest oak tree among its members. The current president is the “Seven Sisters Oak” in Lewisburg, Louisiana. It has a trunk circumference of 39.6 ft, and is estimated to be 500-1,000 years old

The Seven Sisters Oak, named such because it was temporarily part of a farm that belonged to a family with seven sisters

The South, apparently, is a great place for anthropomorphizing trees: a few states away, in Athens, Georgia, is The Tree That Owns Itself.⁴ According to local legend, an eccentric landowner was so fond of one of the trees on his property that he left the tree, and eight feet of land surrounding it, to the tree, ensuring that it could not be cut down by his descendents, or anyone else in town.

Though trees, of course, cannot legally own property, this mythic protection of the tree has persisted, and today the The Tree That Owns Itself is a local landmark. 

Oddly enough, however, it is not the only tree in the United States to own itself. As YouTuber Tom Scott explains in a 2017 video, only two hundred miles away, in Eufala, Alabama, there is another tree that owns itself.

Though this tree has nearly the same backstory, however, it receives far fewer visitors, and (until Scott made a video about it) it received no mention on Wikipedia. 

“Maybe there are other trees out there in other small towns where the same thing’s happened,” he muses, “but I couldn’t find any references to them under all the noise made by the one that everyone noticed. If you want a metaphor for how success on the internet and, heck, anywhere works, then these trees are it: it’s not always about how good your story is. It’s about how many people are willing and able to pass it on.” 

What Tom Scott reminds us - what all of my reading and watching this week, about Pando and Treebeard and the Giving Tree and the trees of Melbourne reminds us - is that while we might befriend trees as individuals, we must care about them as part of the global forest. 

If we are to sustain them - so that they may sustain us - we must learn to live in symbiosis. 

When it comes to the dreams of trees, what should I add to my syllabus?

I want to hear from you, whether it’s in the comments on this post or in emails to me directly at roschmansyllabus@substack.com!

1. A habit he replicates in certain sections of The Lord of the Rings, such as when the urgency of the wounded Frodo’s race to Rivendell does not impede the narrator’s careful cataloging of all the landscape between there and Weathertop.

2. The title of this week’s newsletter is taken from one of Treebeard’s songs, “The Ent and the Entwife”:

When Summer lies upon the world, and in a noon of gold
Beneath the roof of sleeping leaves the dreams of trees unfold,
When woodland halls are green and cool, and wind is in the West,
Come back to me! Come back to me, and say my land is best!

3. Treebeard was, purportedly, inspired by Tolkien’s dear friend C. S. Lewis.

4. Technically The Son of the Tree That Owns Itself, since it was grown from an acorn of the original tree, which died in the 1940s. The son, however, inherited his father’s land.