When was the last time you stopped to say thank you to a tree? Perhaps it’s something we should do more often. After all, we owe them everything, from the air we breathe to the soil beneath our feet, and far less obvious things too. We have trees to thank for the swirl of our fingerprints, our posture, and possibly even our dreams.
In her new book, British tree science consultant Harriet Rix presents trees as an awesome force of nature, a force that has, over time, “woven the world into a place of great beauty and extraordinary variety”. How have trees done this? And can they really be said to possess “genius”?
If you think of life first emerging from the sea, hundreds of millions of years ago, you might picture something like the Tiktaalik, a human-sized floppy-footed fish that hauled itself out of the shallows some time in the Late Devonian. But the evolutionary eureka moment arguably came long before that, when one lucky green alga washed up on the Cambrian shore and managed to survive the deadly UV light on land.
“Plants learning to survive and use UV light was a thunderbolt,” writes Rix. It “allowed a whole new chemistry to emerge, root and branch, in a whole new place: dry land … Safe from predators, who for the moment were left in the sea behind them, these photosynthesising cells started on a path that led to the amazing complexity of trees.”
Viewed on cosmic fast forward, as part of “a strange, apparently accelerated world, in which continents drift around like rubber ducks, bumping into one another”, trees seem almost godlike, using their biochemical wizardry to transform the Earth from a stony, storm-ravaged wasteland into a place where life could thrive. They broke barren rock into soil, canalised flood waters into rivers, pumped oxygen into the atmosphere, and turned the desert green.
Element by element, trees have learned to control water, air, fire and the ground beneath us, as well as fungi, plants, animals, and even people, shaping them according to their own “tree-ish” agenda. Some fairly knotty chunks of biochemistry and evolutionary history are smoothed by lush descriptions of contemporary habitats as Rix travels the world, from the cloud forests of La Gomera to the junipers of Balochistan. She is an intrepid and erudite guide.
Despite the title, this is not a book that gives much weight to questions of tree consciousness or intelligence. It doesn’t stop to consider whether our leafy friends have feelings. Rix acknowledges that the early work of Suzanne Simard – whose research into resource exchange between trees via underground mycelial networks gave rise to the concept of the wood wide web – was “beautiful field science” and “immensely compelling”, but she gives short shrift to subsequent anthropomorphic claims that trees “talk” or “love” or “mother” one another. “Putting a nurturing mammalian face on to the giants of the forest was also a massive betrayal of the complexities of an organism that could be thousands of years old,” she writes. “Thinking of the 5,000 years in which Methuselah [a storied bristlecone pine] has had to negotiate existence makes simple narratives about the gentle exchange of nourishing sugars seem astoundingly trite.”
What, then, is the genius of trees? Rix locates it in the elegant solutions they have devised to the constantly changing riddle of life. It’s a genius you can smell in the rich terpenes given off by trees to seed clouds, generating rain and expanding their own habitats. It’s a genius you can taste in the sweet fruit that makes animals do trees’ bidding, and arguably gave our simian ancestors their brains. It’s a vast, generative genius that has nurtured our own. Our clever fingers – and fingerprints – evolved to grip their branches. Our dreams were born in the safe, fragrant nests we built in their canopies. This is why, Rix argues, we find the smell of wood so comforting, and why we like to press our noses between the pages of books. Genius is too small a word for all of this.
• The Genius of Trees by Harriet Rix is published by Vintage (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
