How to Talk to a Tree

The Pleasure of Communing with our Ancestors

Frenchtown, NJ 2023

When our girls were little, we would take an evening walk to “The Hugging Trees.” The hugging trees are a pair of scrub pines (I like to think of them as sisters) that mark the fork in the dirt path leading to the ponds. They are a half mile from our summer cottage, which is as far as our girls could walk, so we would set out after dinner to wrap our arms around them and say hello.

We have kept the summer tradition. Now, when we pass them on the way to a swim or to visit to our friends who live through the woods, we stop and spend a moment with the hugging trees.

As the years passed, it began to feel like they knew me. I could feel their energetic imprint. I felt sure they recognized mine.

Last summer, the hugging trees and I took our relationship to another level.

One evening, as I was resting my head on the smaller and scragglier of the sister trees, I told it I was feeling scared about the state of world. I experienced the sensation of the tree extracting from my head all my fear and anxiety as if it were a little toy box, spinning it out of me and dissipating it into the evening air.

“Do trees experience fear?” I asked.

In the quiet that ensued, I heard an answer: “Yes. But we are not afraid of it.”

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Trees have been on this planet 400 million years longer than us. First, there were mosses and ferns—small but with the vascular systems that allowed them to lift off the ground. Another 200 million years of evolution brought pines, junipers, spruce, and ginkgoes. And finally the flowering and fruit bearing trees that have fed the entire animal kingdom, including our ancestors, for millions of years.

There is a 10,000 year old tree in Sweden and a 5,000 year old Great Bristlecone Pine in the United States. These living dinosaurs are in our midsts — on sides of roads, backyards, protecting graveyards and forests. And yet, they are so ordinary we can forget to see them. Or feel them.

We share one quarter of our DNA with trees. Our own neural networks look like tree roots and branches and our social systems could gain a lot from learning more about our tree relatives.

Trees share information and nutrients through a below-ground network of fungi called mycorrhizas like underground smoke signals. They share carbon, water and nitrogen among and across species. In Africa, when a herd of elephants approach Acacia trees, the trees emit ethylene into the air, which tells other trees to release the tannins that will make their bark and leaves bitter to the elephants. Trees have no such defenses against clearcutting or the invasive species that have swept across the US and Europe in the last 100 years, nearly wiping out chestnuts, elms, hemlocks and ash.

Our tree guardians need our help. And we need theirs.

I have been cultivating relationships with other trees. As the news from around the world becomes increasingly dire and confounding, I find standing with my back against the great elms of Tompkins Square Park calibrates my nervous system to another timeline—one that began long before I was born and will extend well beyond my mortal years.

My tree friends remind me to breathe steadily and connect through my roots to share the nutrients of wisdom and protection. They show me how I am in the circle of life, that death will come. I don’t need to be afraid of it.

If you don’t already have a tree friend, try making one. Share secrets, ask questions. Hang out and calibrate your nervous system to something other than the news.

And, next time you are out, look up at the trees, especially on a cloudy night when the moon backlights the line drawings of winter branches.

Minnesota, 2024

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FROM THE INSTITUTE OF PLEASURE STUDIES

The best book ever about trees and human interaction is the Pulitzer Prize winning Overstory by Richard Powers. Here’s a little excerpt:

“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, The Overstory

Trees Talk to Each Other: Suzanne Simard’s research and books including Finding the Mother Tree and TED Talks has illuminated the infinite biological pathways in a forest.

I’ve learned a lot about trees and how their nuts were the staple diet for humans from my friend Elspeth Hay. She has a book coming out next year that will blow your mind about trees. For now, you can follow her on IG at @elspethhay

The Ginko Biloba is so ancient it predates the evolution of seed. This and other amazing stories at Trees Inside Out.

I have been printing a lot of my tree photos and also making transparencies that go in your window. If you’d like to buy a print, please be in touch.

Tompkins Square Park, 2023