The Tree and I: A Lifelong love affair

All my life I have been drawn to trees. All kinds of trees. Short ones, tall ones, with or without flowers, desi, walaiti, with or without fruits, evergreens, deciduous, and so on.

My love of trees is linked to my love of birds. Since I have been a keen bird watcher and reveled in writing odes to birds of all kinds, trees being birds’ natural habitats, they become their mere extensions at times (or vice versa). This essay is about trees though. Ergo, if I delve further into my avian love affair then you might as well read my previous essays about my feathered travel companions.

Coming back to trees, a recent book about one tree in particular that I read was Elif Shafak’s ‘The Island of Missing Trees’. The reason I found the novel intriguing was because of one central unnamed character and narrator, a rather talkative fig tree. The book, although fictional and at times delving into some aspect of magical realism, is well researched with respect to plant biology, especially of trees. Add to that plant-animal/human interactions captured through imaginative story-telling, it made for an interesting read, albeit it could have been a lot shorter than its 350 pages.

The plot of the book, essentially a love story within the context of Cypriot history, aside, Shafak’s tale triggered several questions. Irrespective of the rhetorical nature of those, I list the most interesting ones (to me) below.

1. Are trees sentient?

2. Why do trees generate special fuzzy feelings in human observers especially self-proclaimed ‘tree huggers? In the same vein, are there ‘tree whisperers’ out there too?

3. Do trees generate feelings in animals who inhabit them?

4. If so, then could those animals be considered sentient beings, like the trees they inhabit?

5. How do trees communicate with their different parts and other trees across forests?

6. Do trees feel danger (fire, pests, human inflicted damage, etc.)?

7. Can trees mitigate the danger somehow (inflicted upon them by humans, pests, etc.)? How do they respond to dangerous stimuli? Can they?

Plant biology can be more intriguing when you delve into it without assumptions or putting on the ‘expert’s hat (aka botanist, I guess). I do not think that you need to invoke interest in biology to answer the above questions. You just have to consider yourself a human being on whom the care of the planet, with all its marvelous trees, has been entrusted - assume that ‘spiritual’ stance for a moment while you read the rest of this essay.

Reflecting on the aforementioned questions, I felt trees represented stability and safety, which is why people, other animals and birds are drawn to them. And yet like everything else, trees are at the whims of humans who destroy them for industrial, economic, and other mercenary reasons.

Trees are presumptively defenseless against their human attackers currently but maybe one day they will rise up like the arboreal Ents in the Lord of the Rings (LoTR) and wage war on human civilization and then wipe us out? You snicker...I must warn you that I am a diehard ‘Tolkienian’ and hence you must bear with my references to LoTR ad infinitum! Although the Ents of Fangorn Forest in JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth closely resemble our trees, the former are completely mobile and quite articulate. When I first read LoTR almost three decades ago, I developed a special respect and admiration for the leader of the Ents, the wise old Treebeard. Quite recently, I happened to see the biopic ‘Tolkien’, that provides a potentially insightful window as a historical period drama into the young Tolkien. There is a possibility that parts of it were highly dramatized for the movie; regardless, the tragic and difficult times as an orphan, and later his struggles and commitment, getting into Oxford, challenges there, learning ancient languages, creating new ones that none but he could decipher, creating Middle Earth, etc. definitely made for good storytelling about Tolkien’s youth. Tolkien loved forests of England, and I speculate that he likely communed with trees, and that inspiration was evident by the coverage he gave to trees and forests in LoTR.

Can trees feel and communicate? If and when you read LoTR (cover to cover, like I did way back when), you would likely answer yes to this. However, the more scientific and evidence-based answer came to me in a fascinating book called ‘The Hidden Life of Trees’ by Peter Wohlleben, forester, ecologist, and author. The book mentions how trees that grow together (in a forest for instance), do so like

Also quite revelatory was that trees are able to warn each other of danger by sending electrical signals across a fungal network called mycorrhiza.

Wohlleben makes the case for health and happiness of forests being linked to the same for humanity; the eco- friendliness of his viewpoints from the trees’ and forests’ perspective, makes a lot of environmental and economic sense, with sustainability being a core element of it all.

While going through Wohlleben’s book and thinking about its author, what came to mind was,“I won't be surprised if Wohlleben is also a Tolkienian, like me!”

Interestingly reading the profiles of Wohlleben and Tolkien, you realize the stark similarities, with both believing that trees are sentient and mysterious, and with both holding forests to the highest regards.

There are many more tree whisperers other than Shafak, Tolkien, and Wohlleben. For instance, Enid Blyton (of the Faraway Tree in the Enchanted Wood fame) and Stu Silverstein (of the Giving Tree fame). But the crux of the matter remains the same. That there is so much more to trees than meets the eye. There is so much more to learn from these amazing beings. There is so much more inspiration to be received from them. There is so much more tree-based poetry, prose, fiction, non-fiction, art, and science, waiting to be created.

The messages that trees are giving us has already made it amply clear that deforestation with its accompanying climate change and loss of biodiversity will exponentially devastate the environment. And yet it does not have to be so. Tree whisperers and huggers have known this forever. It is high time for the rest of us to follow suit. Wohlleben makes the point much more poignantly than I ever will:“Forests will return...it will just be nice if we were still around”.

Asad Mian MD, PhD is an ER physician-researcher-innovator at the Aga Khan University and a freelance writer. He writes on topics ranging from healthcare and education to humor and popular culture. He authored 'An Itinerant Observer' (2014) and ‘MEDJACK: the extraordinary journey of an ordinary hack’ (2021). All information and facts provided are the sole responsibility of the writer.