I first read the prize-winning The Overstory when it was published in 2018. The image of an airman falling out of the sky during the Vietnam war and being saved by a tree is indelible. But like all great literature, re-reading Richard Powers’ epic novel in a changing context opens up new shafts of meaning. So that image — which is central to a novel where trees factor as protagonists — gains in plangency while the wildfires in California are likely still smoldering. Last August’s conflagrations consumed 9,000 acres containing old-growth redwoods and sequoias.
When these dignified forest kings are burned into black stumps part of our history is incinerated. More of it than you might think, in fact, since the theme of this 2019 Pulitzer winner is the interconnections of our world. The stories that unfold between the roots and the canopy (or overstory) are stories we need to hear.
In Overstory, trees communicate in mysterious ways and entwine and enjoin a handful of people in their struggle to survive buzz saws and climate change. A maverick biologist, a sculptor, and a stoner student transformed by her own brush with death (after electrocuting herself in her student digs), fight alongside the airman to save America’s ancient redwoods and remaining virgin forest. My own windows look out towards Ashdown Forest in Sussex, England, whose woodland dates back to the Norman conquest in the 11th century. Those trees, old and distant, seem more companionable after reading Powers in the midst of a pandemic.
Here are 10 dendrological truths that prompted me to view the world very differently.
1. Treat trees as relatives. They might be. Hailing from a common ancestor a billion and a half years ago, we still share a quarter of our genes with trees, writes Powers (scientific estimates vary). But don’t rush out for Ancestry.com verification.
2. We speak the language of trees. Notes Dr. Pat Westerford — a botanist initially ridiculed by her colleagues as Plant Patty — and one of the novel’s most memorable protagonists, “the word beech becomes book, in language after language […] book branched up out of beech roots, way back in the parent tongue.” Likewise, the word radical comes from wrad, meaning root, and a root is what the words tree and truth also share.
3. Unlike some non-maskers, trees look out for each other and use scent signals to “talk.” Acacias, for instance, alert other acacias when hungry giraffes go stalking by.
Willows, poplars and alders have all been caught warning one another of insect invasion. Others, like the Douglas fir, fuse roots with their own kind, creating an “underground welfare state” to feed and heal each other. It all allows trees to share an immune system that can span acres of woodland. To quote Powers: “Nothing is less isolated or more social than a tree.”
4. Trees can seduce and deduce. Certain species “bribe” us, pumping out airborne chemicals that leave us feeling good after we pass them in the woods. These chemicals also have antibacterial and antifungal properties, and breathing them in boosts our production of the white blood cells that help keep us healthy.
5. Perpetuating their species is everything. Each of the world’s 750 — other sources say around 900 — species of fig trees, for example, has its own unique wasp evolved to fertilize it. Hura crepitans, the sandbox tree, launches seeds from its exploding fruits at 160 miles per hour.
6. Trees don’t have immediate gratification issues. A tree’s seed, for instance, can lie dormant for millennia, as happened with the 2,000-year-old Judean date palm seed found in King Herod’s palace at Masada, and has since germinated. For trees, we humans are still new arrivals in this world.
7. Sometimes the dead are among them living. Pay heed. The gingko tree, for example, is a living fossil.To quote Powers: “It’s the lone species of the only genus in the sole family in the single order of the solitary class remaining in a now-abandoned division that once covered the earth — a living fossil three hundred million years old.”
8. Everything about these slow-growing, supposedly static plants is vast. While the ancient redwood trees that the novel’s eco-warriors fight to protect can shoot up to 300 feet, even an inch-high pecan seedling might have six feet of root.
9. Listen to the book’s botanist Plant Patty. “There’s a tree for every purpose under heaven.” There are trees that make rain, tell the time, predict the weather, as the world’s indigenous peoples once knew.
10. We need trees — now more than ever. Ingredients derived from trees feature in products from shampoo and shatterproof glass to toothpaste, and ice-cream thickener, but they’re also a vital ally in our fight against flooding, pollution, illness.
And a bonus fact? Everything depends on everything else, and it’s as true down here in the understory as it is in The Overstory. Simply put, without trees, there’d be no us.