David George Haskell

Trees

THE PITCH:
Tree
pl. m. of tree [Latin arbor -ŏris]
A perennial woody plant with a columnar, i.e. more or less cylindrical, trunk that expands upwards with woody branches of various shapes and arrangements, which together with the leaves form the so-called crown.
There is a growing urgency to reconnect with nature. What is driving this need? Is it the desire for a slower pace of life and greater well-being? Or is it a desire to rediscover silence, listening, wonder, and even magic?

Trees as catalysts for imagination and belonging

Human attention and imagination have long been attracted and stimulated by trees. In religious stories, trees are central characters, imparting life or special powers. Yggdrasill, a giant ash tree, connected the many layers of reality in Norse mythology. The tree was an axis mundi around which the cosmos was integrated. The Buddha received enlightenment under a fig tree. In the Bible, the “tree of life” grew in the midst of Eden, and Eve and Adam gained the gift of moral knowledge from a tree’s fruit. Olive trees and olive oil are lauded in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scriptures as symbols of divine goodness. For many indigenous peoples in the Amazon region, towering trees are the centers of creation. Trees have long stood at the center of human stories about meaning and origins. What is it that imparts them this power? In a time of rapid change, what can we learn from them? What does our fascination with them reveal about our needs today?

Three qualities of trees offer answers. Like roots, these qualities intersect. First, trees draw our imaginations into time scales that transcend and overwhelm us. This is a startling and renewing experience, especially in an era when so much human technology creates a sense of mastery, not humility. By reframing our sense of time, trees offer a refreshing and necessary counter to hubris. Second, although trees seem to be solitary individuals, they are living communities. They teach us that all life emerges from interconnection and relationship. At a time when so many of us feel alienated and fragmented, this reminder of the importance of interconnection is uplifting and renews our links to the Earth's vitality. Third, trees invite us into sensory reawakening, reminding us not just to look, but to observe closely, to listen, to smell, to taste, and to touch. In this way, trees re-embody us, restoring us to our human senses. This is especially valuable now that much of our life is conducted through electronic media, processes that diminish and narrow human sensory experiences.

Illustrator Elisa Talentino

Time

Minutes, months, years. These are the units by which we measure our lives. In the presence of trees, we become aware that this human experience of time is just one pace and rhythm among many. This is especially true when we encounter ancient trees – gnarled olive or chestnut trees in the countryside or city gardens, twisted pines on mountaintops, and giant oaks or redwoods in moist forests – whose scarred limbs and thick trunks speak of antiquity. These trees are older than any human and they germinated long before the industrial revolution. Because wood is made from air molecules welded together, trees hold the ancient breath of the world in their bodies. The wood in their innermost core is made from air that last was free centuries or millennia ago.

Younger trees also beckon us into beyond-human timescales. A sapling planted today will likely outlive most of us. An acorn that germinates this year could still be alive five hundred years from now. Even an ordinary tree on a city street can span many human generations.

To change the nature of time is a form of Earthly magic. Trees are no supernatural mystics, though. They bring this magic to the world in organic form, in the slow accretion of wood year by year in their growth rings. Our bodies understand this. In the presence of trees, the pace of our thoughts and feelings shifts. We are drawn out of our human time-shell into the possibility of other temporal realities. Implicit in this experience are timescales beyond humans and trees: the frenzy of bacterial lives, each one lasting just hours, or the geologic cycles of stone, a time that passes in millions of years. But bacteria are invisible to unaided eyes, and rocks do not easily disclose their histories. Human bodies, though, immediately comprehend the invitations of trees. Every tree is a portal into radically other timescales.

Community

A tree appears to be a solitary individual, standing alone and strong. But this is an illusion. A tree is a living community, a multiplicity of relationships among many beings. Strength emerges not from isolation but from interconnection. The stout, individuated trunk is a living network.

The tree's community assembles itself through careful conversations between tree cells and other species such as fungi, bacteria, and insects. These dialogues are not verbal, but chemical. A root cell sends a molecule into the soil. A fungus clinging to the rich, soft surface of the root receives the chemical signal. The fungus answers with another molecule that flows back to the plant root cell. Back and forth these signals flow, allowing each partner to assess the identity and intentions of the other. If either party senses parasitic intentions from the other, the dialogue ends. But, if the chat goes well, the fungal and plant cells may intertwine, establishing a bond that benefits each partner. The plant provides sugars and other complex foods, the fungus delivers minerals and water, and can serve as a conduit of information among plants and fungi. Through specialization and cooperation, all thrive. The root succeeds because it is a cross-species chimera

Conversations among many species permeate trees. Trees and other plants send chemical messages to insects and other small animals, summoning those that protect the plant from threats such as pests that eat leaves and roots. Inside leaves, dozens of bacteria and fungi work collaboratively with plant cells. At a smaller scale, every plant cell is made from the stable union of at least three different ancient creatures that were once free-living and separate from one another. One of these ancient creatures now holds most of the plant DNA, another is green and captures sunlight, and the third is a powerhouse, processing energy to keep the cell alive. These three creatures now work together as the unit we call "the plant cell", a single name for what is a busy, productive community.

At a time when the boundaries of human individuality are becoming blurred by rapid technological and cultural change, might trees offer us lessons in what it means to live as a community? In the most challenging environments – amid the rigors of the rainforest, for example – the trees’ cooperative bonds are the strongest. When the struggle for life is intense, community is of paramount importance. Isolation is not an option. No species can follow a solitary path for long. All life is made from interconnection, and the nature of these relationships – whether cooperative or exploitative – shapes us.

Although much of the trees' life-giving community is microscopic, in some places, we humans are essential parts of the cooperative network. For eight thousand years, for example, people and olive trees have collaborated to conjure life from the seasonally arid soils around much of the Mediterranean. Neither species would have thrived without the other. In Amazonia, millennia of careful tending of the soil and trees by indigenous people enhanced the diversity and productivity of the forests. We are part of these relationships even when our lives and work seem removed from direct connection with trees. Half of the oxygen we breathe and much of the clean water and rain are produced by trees. Wood, rubber, paper, and other forest products sustain our livelihoods and cultures. Even the shade cast by trees is a form of mutualism: they cool our cities, and we care for the trees' wellbeing by planting and tending them.

Our senses

Trees awaken human senses. They bring us back to our bodies and the present moment. This sensory connection has profound effects on our physiology and psychology. When we smell the aroma of tree leaves, some of the aromatic molecules slip directly into our blood and cling to our human cells, and others stimulate nerves that run to the deepest parts of our brains. These aromatic effects invigorate our immune system and calm our minds. The simple act of inhaling the vegetal breath of leaves brings us into a transformative, intimate relationship with trees.

Similar changes happen with other senses. Our eyes take soothing baths in the hues and motions of tree leaves and branches. Fingertips revel in the varied textures of bark and leaf surfaces. The sounds of wind and rain pulsing, susurrating, tapping, and squalling as they meet trees give every landscape a sonic signature, the sylvan sound of home. A gust of wind through mountain pines has a deeper, more urgent voice than the whispers of summer oak trees or the clatter of palms on a gusty ocean shore. Even our taste buds appreciate the sensory gifts of trees: the tannic depth of wine and whiskey emerge from the tang of oak barrels. Aesthetic connection to trees – engaging and appreciating them through our senses – retextures us from within. This is another form of organic magic and transformation.

Why Trees?

We hunger for connections to trees. What drives such urgency? A paradox: through our experiences with trees, we transcend the human experience and more fully inhabit our human selves. We leap into other timescales and the multiplicity of ecological communities. This decentering and loosening of the boundaries of the "self" is liberating and can open us to a sense of wonder. The experience reveals something of the multifarious nature of life on Earth. In addition to this outward motion, trees center and ground us in our own lived reality. To lose oneself in the experience of a tree is to become more fully human.

Seek out the trees in your life. In what ways are they present in foundational cultural stories? How do tree timescales intersect with your own? Have you planted a young tree that will outlive you, or admired an ancient tree? In the trees near to where you live and work, what is the nature of interdependence with other species, including humans? What sensory delights do trees offer you today? In allowing yourself to be drawn outward into tree lives, can you find part of yourself?

Bio:
David George Haskell is a writer and a biologist. His books, The Forest Unseen, The Songs of Trees, Thirteen Ways to Smell a Tree, and Sounds Wild and Broken have received many awards, including twice being finalists for a Pulitzer Prize. His next book, How Flowers Made our World: Revolutions of Beauty, Cooperation, and Illusion, will be published in 2026. Find more at dghaskell.com