5 Life Lessons — from a Tree
Trees stay connected
We’re often fretting over the young staying connected 24/7 but trees can show us how to do it to our benefit. They tend to connect during the day but rest during the night — although city lights are causing sleep problems for trees just as much as humans.
There’s now plenty of research to show that trees communicate with each other not only through the air but also through their roots and fungal systems.
By staying connected with each other they send out alerts to dangers to help other trees. So a tree under attack from beetles, say, will find the time to send out an alert to other trees, even as it’s doing its best to fight the invasion that is a risk to itself.
Trees also look after each other in more thoughtful ways. For example in the summer broadleaf birches will send nutrients to evergreen firs which get overshadowed by other broadleaf trees, while in winter the fir repays the favour to the now leafless birch.
Why do they do this? Because trees know that a single tree on its own has less chance of survival than a tree in a forest. A forest or wood allows the right levels of light and humidity for maximum tree health.
A forest can deal with fierce winds and storms, each tree taking the strain and partially protecting the others. Those on the outside are strong and resilient, protecting those further in. Single trees have to deal with it all alone, and they often fall when conditions get tough. Their root systems can’t connect with other trees, so they’re ill-prepared for danger and threats.
A forest is connected by what is now known as the ‘wood-wide web’. As far as we know, trees don’t communicate to bitch about each other or share amusing stories. When communication takes energy you’re unlikely to waste it on a message with a heading of ‘Don’t squirrels do funny things?’.
Trees plan ahead
We’re encouraged to get things done Just in Time. That’s not a great survival strategy for a tree. It plans ahead, and so should we. It can’t wake up one morning and notice that all the other trees are turning their leaves an interesting colour. It takes some serious planning to deal with autumn. And autumn comes for us all.
The trees have to measure the length of nights, and when they reach a certain period of hours the tree knows it’s time to start shutting off the leaves and beginning the long programme to prepare for winter. (Let’s ignore how a tree can detect a period of light or dark — can it count? Does it remember?) But the tree gets into play a one-way process that can take a month or more, and is irreversible. It has to make the right decision at the right time. That’s planning ahead, then that’s definite action.
Trees keep their young near
We’re encouraged to let our young explore early, to fly the nest, not to hang around the home. Trees keep their young near, often literally within the parent’s shadow. A forest has a network of dominant trees spread throughout, trees that scientists call ‘mother trees’. They’re the ones that will be the first to feed a tree that’s struggling, or to help disseminate warnings.
They keep their young seedlings often within reach. This looks like a bad idea. The young offspring may be safely fed but it grows in the shade and so grows slowly. Other young trees further out can grow much faster, shooting up and grabbing some early sunshine.
The young tree can spend a century or more in the shade. But then something will happen. A storm, a sickness — it’s death. The parent topples. The parent dying leaves a gap in the canopy and its offspring is perfectly placed to exploit that sunshine pouring in.
And that young tree is in great shape to deal with the storms and trials of life. Because it grew slowly it grew strong, the trunk thick, the roots dense. Its parent did everything the tree needed, with even the parent’s death benefiting the youngster, who’s only a century or so old.
Some of those other trees that shot up early and which nabbed the early sunshine — when the storms come they’re thin and weak as well as tall, and they’ll crack and break when life gets hard.
Trees are not in a hurry
You would be forgiven for thinking that trees just stand around all day. They’ll suck up some water and manage a bit of photosynthesis as the sun strobes across the sky in a rapid lunge from horizon to horizon — trees take the long view, including of time.
But they’re busy. Sometimes they’re busy moving, relocating. Trees can shift over the horizon if you give them long enough. They’ll withdraw from one area and then colonise a new more promising area, using wind, birds and animals to get their seeds into a more nutrient-rich area. Your grandchildren wouldn’t recognise the forest, it will have moved or spread a significant distance.
In the last ice age trees ‘migrated’ South to escape the oncoming ice. In America they got so far South that they escaped the walls of ice. In Europe they ran up against the East-West mountain ranges like the Pyrennes, and they died there, unable to get over, when the great ice fields ground into them.
Trees start things that won’t be finished for centuries, but they start them nonetheless. And they don’t give up, they keep at it.
Trees get stronger in adversity
A fierce wind or storm is the equivalent of the trees going to the gym. As the winds blow it causes enormous stresses on the huge branches of the trees. When the tree is in full leaf it creates an immense surface area for the wind, meaning the tree has to really strain not to get pushed over. That’s one reason why trees get rid of their leaves in autumn, to give them less resistance to winter storms.
Branches can weigh many tons, and the cantilever effect of them being so long, particularly lateral branches, means the strength of the tree is hard to grasp. The effect is the same as a weight lifter.
Where a sideways branch comes out the trunk the tree will actually put on ‘muscle’. Most of that muscle is added underneath the branch, where it meets the trunk. It’s like a weightlifter adding tricep and lats muscles to help with lifts. Storms make the tree add more bulk and muscle. Adversity makes them stronger.
We noticed this millennia ago. This is what Seneca had to say (in On Providence) about 2000 years ago:
‘Why, then, do you wonder that good men are shaken in order that they may grow strong? No tree becomes rooted and sturdy unless many a wind assails it. For by its very tossing it tightens its grip and plants its roots more securely; the fragile trees are those that have grown in a sunny valley. It is, therefore, to the advantage even of good men, to the end that they may be unafraid, to live constantly amidst alarms and to bear with patience the happenings which are ills to him only who ill supports them.’
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Graham Scott is the author of the Treelogy series, with the first book, Banished to the Forest, available through Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com or the publisher Phillimore Book Publishers.
