What is A Tree?
Listening To & Reading the Arboreta
It’s a tree, Lu. A chokecherry tree. …
Your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom.
from Beloved, by Toni Morrison[1]
My first friend was a tree.
There was a large pine tree in the yard where I grew up in Westchester County, New York – a wealthy bedroom community, where my family lived in the ethnically rich, working-class part of town in a small, modest bungalow. Amongst other Black and immigrant families from Ireland, Eastern Europe, Southern Italy and the Caribbean, I navigated as a shy, odd, artistic kid trying to find her place. That tree was my solace and frequent escape from what felt to me a very challenging atmosphere within my familial culture. I would often sit at the tree’s large trunk and take comfort in the smell of the pine sap, make a soft bed of its pine needles to lay in amongst its roots in the shade of its long branches. I would read there, have private and personal conversations with it, and feel protected by its presence. We shared secrets and it provided a safe space for me to ground myself.
I was oblivious to my place as a girl and assumed I could do anything regardless of my gendered status and explored the neighborhood with my brother and other neighborhood kids bringing home snakes and frogs from the stream behind our local library, climbing trees or exploring woody caverns around the neighborhood; or daydreaming laying on my back on the grass studying the shapes and the characteristics of clouds. I was curious about the insects that consumed my mother’s tomato plants, why the leaves turned colors, and that you could count on the wind (Oya)[2] to make its presence known at certain times of the year. That is all changing fairly rapidly now, as the human effects of climate change shift and affect the weather patterns as we selfishly ravage Mother Earth for our own benefit without regard to its own rhythms, or providing the attention and care a healthy Planet needs to survive and thrive.
We have beautiful yet threatening spotted lanternflies with the most exquisite patterns on their backs here in Pennsylvania taking out maple, birch, black walnut and willow trees among other plants, and emerald ash borers burrowing into ash trees like the plague. Some of you of a certain age may know the 1982 film – Koyaanisqatsi [3] – translated from Hopi as life out of balance, and a long way from the wisdom our Indigenous brothers and sisters used at one time to care for this land, their land.
As the 2024 WARP Wood Scholar-in-residence, I posed the question: What is a Tree? to the other residents. This question is a part of my own research. As an artist, and woodworker I am beginning to look deeper into the culture of the forest and the physiology of trees – a material source that I use in my making and its impact on material culture and material social systems.
My reading into the cosmology of trees and forests has introduced me to recent research from groundbreaking scientists like: Suzane Simard, Colin Tudge, and Peter Wohlleben among others. I was inspired by artist Gina Siepel,[4] whose recent exhibition here at the Museum for Art in Wood To Understand A Tree, shared interests akin to mine.
Native American scientists and writers like Robin Wall Kimmerer, and African philosophers like Mark Omorovie Ikeke, have offered me more traditional and ancient ontologies around trees and their relatives that the Western scientific world is only just catching up with.
I have organized my inquiry around:
- trees as allies of liberation and resistance,
- tress as examples of sustainable persistence,
- trees as examples of regeneration,
- trees as archive, and
- trees as memory.
I am very curious if a tree would remember or note somewhere in its material life, evidence of being used for something as horrifying as a lynching and I plan to visit 20th-century sites, if I can locate them, to observe any evidence of occurrences on trees of these types of spectacles. We know that the presence of as many as 10,000 white bodies would be witnesses to the terror of Black bodies being hung, burned and otherwise physically abused hanging from trees in the American landscape.
The lynching of Frank MacManus, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1882. Credit: Library of Congress
Rereading the artful imaginings of nature in literature such as Toni Morrisons’s 1987 novel Beloved, where the character Amy reimagines the scars 19th-century Sethe has on her back as the branches of a tree; the 2021 novel The Trees – a comic thriller about a series of murders with a mysterious connection to Emmett Till by the recently celebrated and prolific novelist Percival Everett; and listening to Billie Holiday’s 1959 recording of Strange Fruit, [5] a politicized, blues/jazz song that interrupted a flourishing career, has reminded me of the unfortunate connection between trees and violence against black bodies and how nature with all its beauty can be manipulated to unwittingly function as an accomplice to a human’s hate-filled demise.
As an antidote, I was struck by a lovely story one of the WARP Wood residents told me about a tree they encountered in New Jersey near the Delaware Water Gap. The tree referred to as The Council Tree, had been a Native American site of refuge at one time and by its enormity was around for a very long time. It would take about six to eight people touching hands to reach around its diameter, I was told! The life of a tree can last centuries, and our life span is very accelerated compared to theirs. Imagine everything this tree has witnessed in its lifetime: all the people that came and died; all the many seasons of snow and rain, the sun and planets that passed by time and time again; and the stars that danced before it; the plants and insect species that evolved around it; and the animals and birds it nourished and housed.
The Council Tree, New Jersey. Credit: Jamie Herman
It has been proven that trees communicate in the forest through a mycorrhizal network of soil fungi that connect throughout through tiny mycelium threads.[6] Thus, trees think, communicate, and care about each other sending out photosynthetic nourishment when a fellow tree is suffering or sick, or neural warnings when a threat is impinging upon their community. Like families they take care of each other. They even do this between arboreal species with a non-competitive attitude.
Might we learn from tress how to get along, how to be interdependent, kind, generous, show up as strong supportive allies, and help each other be better humans?
Folayemi Wilson
2024 WARP Wood Scholar-in-Residence
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
August 2024
[1] Toni Morrison, Beloved (London: Vintage, 1987) 93.
[2] In Yoruba culture the Orisha Ọya is a river deity and represents the wind, lightening, and storms. She is associated with change, transformation and destruction.
[3] Koyaanisqati (Hopi), is the first film in director Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi Trilogy, with original music by Philip Glass. The film runs for 86 minutes and is composed with no dialogue, only images. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6-K-arVl-U.
[4] To Understand A Tree: https://museumforartinwood.org/exhibition/gina-siepel-to-understand-a-tree/
[5] Billie Holiday. Strange Fruit. (1959). Written and composed by Lewis Allan (Abel Meeropol). Lyrics.
[6] See Suzanne Simard’s research in Finding The Mother Tree (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021).