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I read Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate - Discoveries from a Secret World (translated from German by Jane Billinghurst) as a sort of follow-up to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. Although they are coming at the question from different angles, both books make the same point that plants are, like, alive??

On the one hand, this is something that I think most people vaguely know. But it’s still startling to discover the plants communicate with each other through their root systems, and can send sugars through those roots so effectively that other trees can keep a tree trunk alive for centuries after its crown has died.

But this only occurs in trees in naturally occurring forests. When humans dig trees up to transport them and plant them where we want them, we sever the root tips, and trees never recover the ability to interface with other roots - even if there are other trees available to commune with, which there often aren’t if a tree is planted, for instance, alongside a street.

This helps explain why trees along streets and trees in tree plantations tend to be, in tree terms, quite short-lived. Also, Wohlleben points out, the qualities that humans consider “good” in trees are usually not the qualities that are actually good for trees. For instance, humans like to see trees growing fast, and sometimes point at the quick rate of growth in spruce plantations as proof that these plantations are actually good for trees.

But in fact fast growth is dangerous for a tree, as it creates structural weaknesses that will often kill a tree when it’s around a hundred years old. For human foresters, this is fine, as that’s about as long as we let plantation trees grow anyway, but from a tree’s perspective, 100 years is not a long time at all.

In Wohlleben’s view, humans struggle to understand trees because their perspective is so alien to ours. They’re stationary. Their senses and methods of communication are so different from ours that we struggle to believe trees have senses at all. (“In Wohlleben’s analysis, it’s almost as if trees have feelings and character,” says the incredulous author of this Guardian article, apparently unable to grasp that Wohlleben is arguing that trees DO have feelings, no “almost” about it.)

And, as Upton Sinclair pointed out, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” The modern industrial lifestyle depends on seeing not just trees but the entirety of the natural world as raw materials we can dispose of as we will. Now, of course we’re capable of accepting that trees have feelings and then blithely refusing to change our behavior on account of that fact: after all, we do this with other humans all the time. But why bother embracing extra cognitive dissonance? It’s just easier all around if we continue to see trees as technically animate but more or less inert objects.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

My Unread Bookshelf Book this month was Meredith Nicholson’s Rosalind at Red Gate, which I originally picked for its gorgeous cover illustration of a canoe festival illuminated by Chinese lanterns, which I am happy to say is a scene that actually occurs in the book. The author is good at beautiful set pieces and lively action, but not so good at things like “coherent motivation” and “keeping track of which of the two almost-identical girls is in this scene.” (Also, although the Rosalind of the title is definitely a hat-tip to As You Like It - Nicholson quotes from the play, just in case we didn’t get there ourselves - there is no cross-dressing at all.)

The title of Tasha Tudor’s Heirloom Crafts might give you the impression that this book will contain crafting instructions, but it does not, possibly because when Tasha Tudor does a craft it’s something like “Well, if you want to make a linen shirt, first you sew the flax…” (I hasten to add that Tasha Tudor did not grow all her linen from seed. Sometimes she bought the fibers and merely spun, wove, and sewed.) Gorgeously photographed. I wish I could step back in time to attend one of the barn dances Tasha Tudor threw when her crafting friends all got together.

And I finished Dorothy Gilman’s Incident at Badamyâ, which was a delight! In Burma, not long after World War II, half a dozen people are kidnapped and held for ransom, and in the forced proximity of their captivity these strangers who don’t much like each other learn each other’s stories and grow as people and come to rely on each other, and also put on a puppet show, and I was so afraid they were going to escape before they did the puppet show but NO. Gilman knows we NEED the puppet show.

Now is this in any way an accurate depiction of Burma, you ask. Well, unfortunately my only other source of information about Burma/Myanmar is Amy Tan’s Saving Fish from Drowning, which is also about a bunch of tourists who get kidnapped (did Tan read Incident at Badamyâ at an impressionable age?), so I have no idea. Gilman’s book is very good at what it does, but what it’s doing is “Westerners (plus the daughter of a very depressed missionary who mostly let her run wild, so she has a lot of inside knowledge about Burmese culture without being fully an insider) in forced proximity,” so if you want something from a Burmese point of view this is not the book for you.

What I’m Reading Now

Continuing on in Puck of Pook’s Hill. I’ve gotten to the Roman Britain part, and even if I didn’t know already that Rosemary Sutcliff was a big Kipling fan (she wrote a book about his children’s books!), the influence is obvious. I just got to the story where our Centurion hero is posted to Hadrian's Wall and I'm getting STRONG Frontier Wolf vibes.

I also started Gothic Tales, a collection of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Gothic short stories, which I’m loving so far. I just finished the one featuring a spectral child who beats on the windows during snow storms and begs to be let in…

What I Plan to Read Next

Has anyone read Amy Tan’s The Backyard Bird Chronicles? I’ve been eyeing it thoughtfully but haven’t taken the plunge.