Hermann Hesse believed that if we can learn to listen to the trees, we can gain a deeper insight into our human lives by finding a deeper meaning in life. He used listening in a metaphorical sense. But the greatest present gift of the trees – to us in the metaphors they give us, and to them themselves in the life of the material things – may be a kind of music, which counts their beauty in strengthening the power: beyond the “blind hope” of the witchcraft of the poem of the tree is more than listening to the world and responding with wisdom, inspired and inspired wisdom.
So suggests the arborist William Bryant Logan for his contribution to Old Growth – a wonderful anthology of essays and poems about trees, collected from a deep archive of decades Orion Magazinewith contributions as diverse as Ursula K. Le Guin and Michael Pollan, and a foreword by poetics scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer.
In a speech titled “The Things Trees Know,” Bryant writes:
To study how trees grow is to admire not only their persistence but also their imagination. Living wood will not stop. Every time you drop it, it comes back, but when a plant sprouts, it's not a random shot, like a finger just raised to make a point. Instead, the growing tip of any stem – what plant scientists call a meristem – responds in an innate, complex, rhythmic pattern.
He presents a musical analogy, thinking of Charlie Parker's famous advice to young musicians on the steps to becoming a true jazz artist: learn the instrument, learn the songs, and then rise to the freedom of the ability to make jazz. Pointing to Coltrane's “My Favorite Things” as a perfect example of that three-step victory, Bryant writes:
It begins with a perfectly clean statement of the song, beautiful in itself with the richness of its tone, the notes are almost strong, so that you can build a house with them. Within three minutes, the song has changed into completely unexpected situations, sizes, glissades that rise and fall, stops and starts, pianissimos to fortes, but never lose the thread of that original song. Every tree is a jazz player, just like this, while a long piece by Coltrane might last a quarter of an hour, a tree's performance might go on for half a millennium or more.
Understanding a particular tree, Bryant says, is a matter of understanding “its notes, its scales, its rings, its flats, and its time signatures.” In the 1970s, botanists Francis Halé, Roelof Oldeman, and PB Tomlinson identified six sets of choices, which act as songs that each tree composes to compose its own song: to branch (most trees) or not to branch (palms); if it is branching, the branch is only at the bottom of the stem or everywhere; growing new branches only on the top (staghorn sumac), only on the outside (pagoda dogwood), or in some combination of the two; growing each branch in a continuous upward or downward direction determined at the beginning, or changing the direction as it grows; flowering at the tips of branches (staghorn sumac) or along them (maple); to grow the trunk and branches continuously without resting or having a period of rest.
Bryant writes:
In these six selections, each plant plays its own song, a phrase that has marked its species for millions of years. No matter where its seed sprouts, each one will try to play its own song.
The tree does this through a deft development process that adapts to the many fortunes and events of its environment, changing the scale of its music as needed. (This reminds me of Coltrane's own opinion that jazz musicians are born with a certain feeling that “just comes out no matter what the circumstances are.”) Botanists call the tree responsive. repetition. Bryant writes:
Jazz: take a song, stretch it, cut it to pieces, put it back together, turn it up or down, flatten it, or shoot it into the sky. Each tree gets its chops, gets its charts, and discards them. It knows the chart by heart, and so can repeat it in variations for thousands of years, as it grows to perfection, lives among its peers, and grows down. Good and bad morphogenesis, they call the cycle: growth and growth.
As soon as the song is played, the first repetition is the first major branch. As a deciduous tree grows, it will form what arborists call scaffolding branches. These are a few – maybe five to eight – very large trunks from which the tree will hang most of its crown – that is, most of its small branches and millions of leaves … The ability of the tree as an organism is similar to Coltrane in its explosion: it returns diversity to a continuous theme.
In his classic love letter to trees, written long before the science of replication was understood, Hesse noted that trees “struggle with all their life force for one thing only: to make themselves according to their own rules”—that is, to play their own song. But however much they may be, in Hesse's words, “preachers who penetrate too much” in the art of living, they have much to teach us about the art of dying. Beyond the already confused science of why a tree, like a person, is partially dead in all life, trees are living proof of Richard Dawkins' amazing view on the fate of death, virtuosos of the art of allowing life to conform to the same purposeful nature we live by.
It quotes a common saying about oaks – “Three hundred years grow, three hundred years live, three hundred years die.” – Bryant observes a third stage of tree life, known as negative morphogenesis, or “downward growth”:
Growing down is not just decay. It works and improves as it was to build. The roots are damaged or dying. Branches get lost in storms. Holes open in the trunk and are covered with mold like the amazing and aptly named dry saddle. The strict system of tree rotation resolves itself back into different paths, some alive and some dead. It is clear that the branches of the scaffold become separate trees, as they do again, some keep their roots and others lose them. Now the tips of the upper branches begin to die back. Instead of growing new branches that multiply on their lower sides, as they did in their youth, they now sprout perfect young trees of their kind from the tops of the branches, between the trunk and the dead ends. It is a complete repetition of the theme song, which occurs many times between the surviving branches.
What happens in this dying stage is a process known as Phoenix renaissance:
Little by little, the tree loses its crown, first small branches, then big ones. Root rot. The circulatory system that carries water up to the leaves begins to break down. If no leaves appear on the branch, it can no longer feed itself. It dies and falls to the ground, but the tree does not lose strength. When a giant that was once ninety feet tall has shriveled to twenty feet tall, its miniatures may sprout from the lower trunk or even the root, wherever the living connection between root and branch survives… It is not impossible that one or the other of those last shoots – if only it can form its own stable root systems – may grow to endless feet and all the trees will not die.
Recounting his encounter with a long-fallen Osage orange tree, a dead trunk from which the two former branches have risen upward as new trunks full of life, Bryant returns to his metaphor for developing music:
It is as if a person puts his arm in the dust, stretches out his palm, and two perfect arms appear from his lifeline, full of muscles and tendons and blood circulation, hands, palms, fingers and nails. Or maybe it's more accurate, as if a person lays down at night and sprouts two new people in one night, from toes to calves. I think John Coltrane would have liked a phoenix revival. It's like those moments in “My Favorite Things” when the whole piece seems like it's going to jump from the top of the soprano sax register, but suddenly the song starts again.
Old Growth it is a source of absolute wonder and wisdom. Fill this piece with Dylan Thomas's short, brilliant poem about trees and the wonders of being human, Thoreau on the true value of a tree, and forester and biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus on how the amazing science of “tree islands” illuminates the key to resilience.
