10-13 year olds, SLO County, CA, United States
Can you feel the critters that live in your roots and trunk? Does mistletoe feel like jewelry? Can the trees speak to each other?
AH:
Dear friends,
I appreciate your questions. They all sound so different at first, but all of them are about how I feel and experience the world. First, I should say that I don’t think I feel pain in the same way you do. Pinch your finger. Do you feel that? That prickly feeling in the tip of your fingers that makes your eyebrows scrunch up so quickly is something I can’t experience.
Now pinch my branch. Ouch! Just kidding: you didn’t hurt me. In fact, I am often grateful when people cut some branches, so long as they do it carefully. If you had started to prune me when I was very young and kept doing it, and kept me in a small pot, you would have what is called a bonsai, a tiny tree that can be hundreds of years old (I am barely 200 years old, but you get the idea). That wouldn’t have hurt me, though I would see the world very differently as a short tree in a pot in your courtyard than I would as a great bur oak in a forest.
I sometimes choose to drop my own branches, and that doesn’t hurt either. I was born as an acorn in a prairie about 30 miles west of Chicago. At that time, I had sun on all sides. I grew for about 5 years, then a fire burned the prairie and my stem was burned down to the ground. You might think this would hurt, but I cannot say that it did. My roots were still alive, and the very next year I kept growing upward. Another fire three years later burned me down to the ground again, but again I kept growing. I looked only 1 year old above ground, but really I was 8. I kept growing, and no more fires came. I had light all around me and grew broad limbs that spread out in all directions, low to the ground, even as I grew taller.
Without fires, I and the trees around me kept growing, and together we formed a shade that grew increasingly deep. In time, my lower branches couldn’t produce enough sugar by photosynthesis to warrant keeping them around. So I sealed them off so my body wouldn’t get infected when I dropped them, and I let them go. Don’t be sad! It was just part of growing up. You can still see the lumps on my side where those big branches used to grow. Those lumps tell you a little of my history. Letting go of those side branches was part of how I grew tall enough to be part of the forest I live in now.
However, I do experience something like what you mean when you say “feeling.” When an insect bites me, I emit a chemical that other trees can sense, and that tells them I am being chewed on. The other trees around respond by setting up defenses against the insect. I have often gotten a little spore of fungus growing in the wood of my trunk or a branch, and that fungus would very much like to have crawled all through my body. But the vessels that carry water through the wood could sense the fungus, and they filled up with little cell membranes that had swelled up like balloons to stop the fungus in its tracks. That’s a kind of feeling, too, isn’t it? So, yes: I can feel the critters that live inside and on me.
And I think this answers your question, “can trees talk to each other?”. The chemical I emit when an insect bites me, which other trees perceive and respond to, is a kind of communication. I pass along a signal, and my neighbors detect it and act on it. That sounds similar to what you mean by talking.
Yet when we use the words “talk” and “feel,” I don’t think it means the same thing for me that it does for you. You and I share a common ancestor, but that ancestor lived one billion or more years ago. That means that your feelings and my feelings probably are as different as our bodies. Think about how different our lives are. You and I both say “I’m standing still,” and the fact that we are using the same words may make us think we’re saying the same thing… but we aren’t. For me, “I’m standing still” means something like, “I have my roots in the ground, I have a strong trunk that holds my branches high in the air, and I am pulling water from the soil up to my leaves to keep the leaves alive and catching enough light with my leaves to produce food for the rest of my body.” For you, the very same words mean “I am balancing on my two feet, and I’m not walking, but I am breathing in and out so that all the cells in my body get oxygen, and my heart is beating.” The words are the same, but the meaning is very different. The same thing is true of the words “feel” and “hurt” and “talk.”
Thank you for your questions. It’s nice to be asked these things and have a chance to talk them through.
With best wishes,
A bur oak living in Downers Grove, Illinois
(translated to the best of his abilities by Andrew Hipp)
P.S. I’m sorry I didn’t answer your mistletoe question. I’m living in a place where there is no mistletoe. Maybe one of your nearby California oaks can answer this for you.
