The trees talk to each other
By: Kayli Kunkel
Tags: Nature, Books, Conservation, Life Lessons

I was in a dressing room in a city I can no longer remember when I heard a voice float loudly from beyond the door: “It’s about trees — about how they talk to each other.”

In an instant I knew what the stranger was trying to describe. I too had failed to accurately explain it.

Before finding this book, never in my life had I considered the sentience of trees. Now I can’t so much as walk past a sidewalk elm without reaching out to touch its bark and thanking it, wondering about its story.

I had read The Overstory by Richard Powers on a 17-hour plane ride from New York City to Delhi, India. Or rather, I wholeheartedly and breathlessly fell into it and left everything else, material or immaterial, far behind. No small feat for a long-haul redeye read.

Before finding this book, never in my life had I considered the sentience of trees. Now I can’t so much as walk past a sidewalk elm without reaching out to touch its bark and thanking it, wondering about its story.

By entwining the lives of nearly a dozen characters, trees drive the plot. A young woman, after recovering from a near-death experience, finds herself chasing after the souls of trees preparing to be deforested in the Pacific Northwest. A Midwestern man plants a seed, and decades later his descendants continue photographing the yield year after year, an unchanging thing amidst grief and loss. A woman grapples with her Chinese heritage and the legacy of her family history with trees, as she entangles with a man who was saved, quite literally, by the embrace of a branch. The characters unite to protect old-growth forest, but that’s hardly the point. While every single narrative is richly developed, complex, and important, no character shines quite so poignantly as the trees.

In this book, the trees speak without saying a word. Sometimes they’re spiritually, metaphorically, or artistically vocal. Other times they speak through nature’s sound, like the rush of wind battering through a Redwood’s matronly limbs. Some characters interact with trees through scientific discoveries — the interconnectedness of roots beneath the undergrowth, or the airborne warning signs of disease sent like silent alarms mysteriously across state lines. At times the language of trees takes on a blunt force: crashing on the forest floor, going up in smoke, or exploding out wildly from a tidy suburban yard.

I tore through this book, all 400-some pages of it, like a wide-eyed child stepping into a magical forest for the first time.

My persona of nature wasn’t just a caricature I applied for comfort; the tens of thousands of tree species on our planet are truly alive, sentient, and adaptable beings. It was revelatory.

When I finally closed it, exhaled, and felt that pang of grief that follows a soul-rending read, I looked around and saw the whole world with new eyes.

I had always loved and identified with nature as a spiritual thing. A place to rest, a patron of calm. As an anxious, traumatized child, I felt most at ease with animals chirping around me or with my feet on a trail. I picked dandelions during soccer practice and cried when anyone squashed a bug.

But after reading this book, it dawned on me that my persona of nature wasn’t just a caricature I applied for comfort; the tens of thousands of tree species on our planet are truly alive, sentient, and adaptable beings. It was revelatory.

Now I have over 40 houseplants in my tiny apartment that I cultivate with care. I know the personalities, needs, and species of every one. I emphatically compost, and I started an herb garden on my balcony. I spend much of my free time researching home remedies with plant ingredients like cacao butter and calendula leaves.

I see others coming into a reverence with nature—a bond, really—in a similar way. Houseplants, once considered decor, have become a source of prideful caregiving for many city-dwelling people, akin to having pets. The interest in natural living, relying on the benefits of plants above and beyond artificial ingredients, is explosive. “Plant-based” is finally a desired label after years of reliance on synthetics.

Maybe it’s the pandemic, forcing us into tight spaces and planting a longing for fresh air and living green. Maybe it’s our economic insecurity, persuading us to rely on our own homegrown food sources. Maybe it’s our fears of bad health, encouraging us to lead more natural, nourishing lifestyles. Kinship with plants is also empowering when we otherwise lack control. I was moved by a podcast featuring the founder of Black Girls With Gardens who, after sharing plenty of wonderful home growing tips, described a closeness with the earth as a necessary and beautiful thing, writing over years of a painful legacy with the land caused by slavery. As she described it, growing her own fresh vegetables and herbs was a source of pride and security.

It’s my hope that the way many of us are moved by nature keeps catching fire. Capitalism is a machine in which plant resources are fed into one end, chopped into the right profitable formats, and spit out as waste. Racial and other social injustices rely on this system, in which power over people is largely in the hands of those yielding that same power over natural ecosystems. At a Black Lives Matter march in Queens, indigenous groups joined to organize and protest their adjacent struggle, when their relationship to the land itself was taken from them. The more we take back, the better chance we have to dismantle and reinvent, with nature and human life first.

And as we social distance in our confined spaces and reminisce on happier summer days amidst fresher air and trees, we might be moved and comforted to learn from The Overstory that the trees, too, remember.