Remembering Trees

If I ask you to tell me about your best friend, does your mind picture them and then bounce around bringing different moments and events to mind? Mine does. Memories are how we store personal knowledge, and they do not follow linear time, or come with a logical index.

One of the most important things to distinguish memory from current perception, or the present, is that in pure memory the temporal sequence of events is shattered.
Henri Bergson

My place-knowledge is not in a temporal sequence either. Its separate records do not come with a time-stamp. Sometimes I can date a memory by layers of emotion that come with it, or by the presence or absence of a tree or building, but not often.

I’ve known this place, these 15 acres, since the height of a major drought. I’ve watched the smaller plants, the grasses in particularly, recover their fecundity as the rains returned, and now I am watching the cedars ,and others, die. The lag between the drought years and their deaths varies by tree species. At first the old cedars looked healthy but many elms were already dead, along with a lot of young, over-crowded skinny cedars, quick to fall over and hang up in another’s canopy. Three years after the rain started again the ancient cedars are all dead or dying, with very few exceptions. So much so that the entire character of the forest is changing. The mix of trees is favoring the oaks. We, the human managers, also favor the oaks, but only when clearing underbrush. Yaupon holly (which is still the most plentiful tree species in our woods and seems indestructible), and young, overcrowded cedars are pulled out; previously unseen oak and ash saplings get to stay.

Trees think and have memories too, just not in the same way that we do. David George Haskell describes what we know (so far) of tree memory and communication:

The fir also remembers air temperatures dating back nearly a year, a memory that helps the tree to know when to winterize its cells. Plant memories can cross generations, as the offspring of stressed parents inherit an enhanced capacity to generate genetic diversity when the breed, even if this next generation experiences benign conditions. We only partly understand how plants hold these memories…Plant memory is…captured in biochemical architecture…

Part of a plant’s intelligence exists not inside the body but in relationship with other species…These chemical exchanges locate decision making in the ecological community, not in any one species.
David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees

I often wonder if the other trees are still grieving for their companions even as the wildflowers rush to fill the newly sunlit areas. When trees die we know that they dump their food, the sugar from photosynthesis, to the root fungi where it can be transported to other trees in the area. Do this year’s oak leaves hold, and remember, some of the old cedars in their cells?

Oaks are the only trees in my forest that have individual names, at least so far. Their forms are so unique, from Climbing Oak with his low branch and wide crook for a hideout, to Hunter’s Oak which has a high platform of unknown age and stability to hunt from, to the Younglings that stand shyly at the edge of the meadow, waiting for their names to come to them. Sometimes, when I am sitting in the meadow, on the bench that was once shaded by a cedar and is now strangely adrift in the center, I seem to feel the network of oaks. It is not just underground, but all around me in the air, whispering like the trees in Narnia. I feel the connection between Twin Oaks behind me, Climbing Oak, the various Arch oaks that have stubbornly grown around now-deceased cedars, and the young saplings. They are a family. Perhaps one day I will be quiet enough to hear and understand their voices.