What I Learned From Trees
My grandfather could identify every tree he saw. He could tell a persimmon from a poplar or a sassafrass from a sweetgum at a hundred yards.
When we walked through the forest together, he would name them in an unbroken litany as if he were calling up spirits. It was one of his rare talkative environments.
To me, as a boy, it was like a magic power. For a man of his generation and geography, it was second nature.
I’m hard-pressed to identify anything outside a sugar maple or ginkgo even with my Peterson Field Guide under my arm.
I may have spent much of my life in forests, but I’m only a tourist there. Although I did manage to amass 32 ticks in a single romp through a cedar grove, and I’ve gotten chiggers in places that would make the bawdiest of us blush, my conventional suburban upbringing consisted more of movie theaters and arcades than forests and fields. My chores were far more prosaic than my forebears; I did a stint splitting wood to feed a constantly ravenous wood stove, but I spent far time more emptying dishwashers and taking out trash. Let’s just say I wasn’t exactly clearing fields or harvesting.
The men in my family have always loved the woods, but have never been hunters, myself included. We camped and hiked often, but had to time our excursions around deer and turkey seasons.
In other words, I played in the forest. I didn’t live in it. I didn’t rely on it for my livelihood, my shelter or my sustenance.
But trees weigh heavily in my life. My earliest memory is of dappled sunlight through trees in summer. I can take you to the exact tree in a 250-acre forest where I carved my initials at 12. I’ve uprooted young trees with a sharp rock and a pocket knife and transplanted them. I’ve killed more bonsai than I care to admit, and I write this now under the shade of the hemlock and dogwood behind my house (yes, I looked them up in the field guide just now and I’m 90% sure I’m right).
Though I my not have learned their names, they’ve taught me lessons that reverberate through my work and relationships.
They’ve Been Around
The confirmed oldest living tree is a bristlecone pine in California named Methuselah.
It’s 4,852 years old.
That means it was a seedling in 2832 BCE. It’s older than the pyramids at Giza, way older than the Parthenon, twice as old as Christianity, and about 20 times the age of the United States.
It puts my deadlines in perspective.
I find great comfort in knowing that something is capable of outliving me on such a scale, and that it doesn’t require engineers or archivists to do so. A tree doesn’t need religion or politics. Just sunlight, water and a little room to breathe.
They Demand Patience
They grow slowly. Even the fast-growing ones grow slowly.
I learned very quickly that bonsai is not a hobby for the impatient. The pauses between steps sometimes take years.
It is literally slower than watching grass grow.
Trees demand our patience in every way. If you want to cut one down, you have to take your time, and you have to have a strategy — unless you’re into getting crushed. Orchards demand years of commitment and constant attention. In time, a tree’s roots will break or find a way around anything you try to build over them.
There is power in inexorable growth done with care and patience.
They Look Out for Each Other
Trees share resources and communicate with one another.
Just under the soil of every forest is an unbelievably complex network of roots. Trees use this system to share nutrients with other trees and to communicate through electrical impulses — dying trees even use it to share nutrients with trees of other species.
Sit with that for a second.
They Thrive in Diversity
Forests need genetic and species diversity in their trees and flora.
Trees in forests with greater biodiversity grow at a faster rate, are more resistant to disease and store more carbon. Research also shows biodiverse forests are hardier in regions with less water and longer growing seasons — which makes them more resistant to negative effects of climate change.
They Are Beautiful… Naturally
Trees don’t need creative directors to be beautiful.
A tree’s form develops naturally, and takes its instruction only from the elements — sunlight, water, wind, oxygen. For centuries, painters and bonsai masters have perfected crafts that are ultimately directed toward replicating something that happens naturally and effortlessly.
Trust me when I say that I write this piece at this particular moment for a very specific reason. All of us are feeling complicated emotions right now. We may feel unified and strengthened by social movements, or we may feel singled-out and frightened — or both at the same time. We may feel alone and alienated by the pandemic or unemployment. We know that we’re only at the beginning of an era that is going to require a lot of hard work.
My note to look to trees isn’t a feel-good solution or an excuse to slip away from work that needs to be done. It’s a call to look for perspective, to look for quiet and to make space for breath, beauty and knowledge that some things outlast even empires.
Novelist Richard Powers, author of Overstory, says, “A huge part of human anxiety is fomented by what psychologists call ‘species loneliness,’ the sense we’re here by ourselves, and there can be no purposeful act except to gratify ourselves … We have to un-blind ourselves to human exceptionalism.”
If I “un-blind” myself to this in my work, I find a lot to learn about the strength of diversity, the importance of effortlessness and grace, and the sheer power of patience.
