When you’re in times of trouble
And feeling down and blue,
Remember that the mighty oak
Was once a nut like you.
- a groaner from Anonymous
I rounded a corner on a dusty hiking trail, and there they were: gotcha!
I’d found the sparse deciduous tree, Quercus garryana: the Gary Oak. It’s habitat is limited mostly to Washington, Oregon, Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands. I walked up to up to one of the moss-covered oaks and sat down under it’s twisting limbs, admiring the view west to Vancouver Island.
The species is named after Nicholas Garry, a 19th century deputy governor of the Hudson's Bay Company. And for the purposes of this article, I’ll refer to my leafy friend I relaxed under as “Gary.”
According to Parks Canada, Garry oak woodlands support more species of plants than any other land-based ecosystem in British Columbia. Quercus garryana has a lifespan of up to 500 years, and the District of Oak Bay has a $10,000 fine on the books for anyone who cuts down or damages their iconic tree.
Gary appears to me to be a relative youngster, but with the gravitas of a skyscraping sequoia or gnarled Jericho tree.
Sitting under my anthropomorphized oak it occurs to me the more I learn about human beings the more I like trees. Don’t get me wrong; human beings can be perfectly delightful mammals, one-on-one. They’re not all that bad in small groups either. But beyond a certain number in close association, all bets are off.
Ballistic missiles, reality television, fiat currency, megachurches, safe spaces, cheese in a spray can, vaccines that are neither “safe” nor “effective”: all sprang from the heads of hairless apes, signed off by other hairless apes. In contrast, trees in groups - a forest - offer free shade and no known desire to buy, sell, convert or otherwise browbeat. All humans’ geologically recent isms, from objectivism to Wahhabism, lie outside their light-munching leisures.
But you’d be mistaken to think trees and plants are stupid because they lack nervous systems. They manage to process some seriously sophisticated information in their free time, which is pretty much all the time.
A superb 2013 article by Michael Pollan in The New Yorker outlined the change in academic thinking:
Slayman went on to acknowledge that “intelligent behavior could perfectly well develop without such a nerve center or headquarters or director or brain—whatever you want to call it. Instead of ‘brain,’ think ‘network.’ It seems to be that many higher organisms are internally networked in such a way that local changes,” such as the way that roots respond to a water gradient, “cause very local responses which benefit the entire organism.”
Seen that way, he added, the outlook of Mancuso and Trewavas is “pretty much in line with my understanding of biochemical/biological networks.” He pointed out that while it is an understandable human prejudice to favor the “nerve center” model, we also have a second, autonomic nervous system governing our digestive processes, which “operates most of the time without instructions from higher up.” Brains are just one of nature’s ways of getting complex jobs done, for dealing intelligently with the challenges presented by the environment. But they are not the only way: “Yes, I would argue that intelligent behavior is a property of life.”
Mother Trees
1997, UBC forestry professor Suzanne Simard was part of a team of researchers who discovered that trees are interconnected through an underground web of mycorrhizal fungi. They found that trees communicate through this network by exchanging carbon, nutrients and water (confounding long-held beliefs in forestry science that all trees compete for sunlight and resources).
Simard and her team identified “Mother Trees,” the largest trees in the forest which act as central hubs for immense underground fungal networks. Young trees and seedlings are supported by the Mother tree by ferrying the nutrients to them that they need for growth.
By using carbon isotopes to trace the sharing of nutrients between trees, the team made an astounding discovery about two particular species. Via the fungal network, Douglas firs share excess sugars with leafless birches in the spring and fall, and in exchange the birches provide the Douglas firs with sugars in the summer.
The green scene not only mastered solar power long before our ancestors were tree shrews, they also figured out the thorny problem of resource distribution. In contrast, humans are still trying to puzzle out how to efficiently direct aid to regions struck by earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and international banking.
(Scientists insist that biological evolution has no definitive progressive direction. I think we can say the same for cultural evolution. As our consumer electronic devices get smarter and smarter, we appears to be getting dumber and dumber.)
Gary and his kind don’t seem do much of anything, but that’s only because they occupy a different temporal realm. Many of us have delighted at the liveliness of plants seen in time-lapsed footage, but this goes beyond tendrils tremulously trembling towards sunlight. Scientists are now discovering that almost every behaviour we attribute to animals has a variant in plants - just at a slower pace.
If you think that’s an exaggeration, I encourage you to snap up a copy of Brilliant Green: The Surprising History of Plant Intelligence, by Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola.
And that brings us back to brain matter. Among the authors’ findings is that Charles Darwin was correct about the radicle, or root tip, of a young plant: it indeed functions as a kind of botanical brain, altering its direction of growth before contact with rocks and other obstacles. As Pollan explained in his New Yorker piece, plants have evolved between fifteen and twenty senses, including the perception of gravity, humidity, and electromagnetic fields.
Well over a century ago, the taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus affixed the species term sapiens (thinker) to the genus homo. With the plant kingdom silently boasting well over more than a dozen senses versus our five (okay, maybe six), who or what better deserves the sapiens label?
As Simard and her colleagues discovered, trees know a thing or two about local community. Once asked what the best thing humans can do for the enviroment, the poet Gary Snyder responded, “stay put.” He elaborated with this trenchant observation about human mobility:
One thing to do is not to move. To stay put. Now staying put doesn't mean don't travel. But it means have a place and get involved in what can be done in that place. Because without that we aren't going to have a representative democracy that works in America. We're in an oligarchy right now, not a democracy. Part of the reason that it slid into oligarchy is that nobody stays anywhere long enough to take responsibility for a local community and for a place."
Perhaps I’m just a blur to Gary as I relax against his trunk: a momentary, barely sensed flash of funky animal pheromones. Trees are playing a long game, not based on the megahertz cycles of the microchip, but on the seasonal shifts of the sun. With the fast-paced human world unravelling from the curse of short-term thinking, it seems we could learn a thing or two from the oaks and their kin.
We love trees, especially our Gary Oaks. Thank you!
I love the idea that the trees communicate!. Could it be the reason all living beings exist?