Hey -
Find me in the apple orchard. The trees are in full flower on the north slope of Peter’s Hill in the Arnold Arboretum; their perfume dense in the air. Many of these crabapples are over 120 years old. Some grow sideways, others have thick limbs twisted in embrace.
I’m under a variety called Purple Prince, nose in the blooms, hair in my face, kneeling in a patch of violets that are gyrating in the wind. Beyond my immediate vantage are the orderly rooftops of southern Jamaica Plain and further on, the soft peak of Great Blue Hill. Ecosystems within ecosystems. I feel at once insignificant and integrated.
About these trees - have you heard of the underground fungal network that connects trees into a larger community of what scientists call mutuality? It was first studied by ecologist Suzanne Simard, who wanted to look more closely at what she presumed was some kind of symbiotic relationship between fir and birch trees in a forest in British Columbia.
Her research uncovered a network of “hyphae” - strands of fungus that are interconnected between the root systems of trees to create a complex and extensive network of resource sharing. Simard, writes Robert Macfarlane in his book Underland,
…proposed the forest as a co-operative system, in which trees ‘talk’ to one another, producing a collaborative intelligence she described as ‘forest wisdom.’
I wonder what these crabapple trees, planted and cared for by horticulturalists rather than growing wild in a forest, could tell us about living here on this hill in the city, sharing space with their companion trees for decades, witnessing the changes to their own tree community and the broader one that includes us.
As members of a co-operative system, does their underground social network somehow help them withstand today’s wild wind, this winter’s mega blasts of snow and ice, days of hard rain, searing summer heat, and the rest of the turmoil composing the changing climate here? What do they feel when their neighbor loses a limb in a storm?
These trees are here - rooted, networked - because humans planted them and they adapted to their surroundings. They’re thriving from care - these are prized ‘specimens’ at a tree museum after all - but also from that underground social network that roots them to one another. Not to overly anthropomorphize, but trees! They thrive in community.
Above ground and among humans, what roots us to a place? There’s witnessing the changes - the toddlers we once knew becoming teens; the births and deaths, marriages and divorces, departures and returns; the way the homes and cars and dogs are getting fancier around here. There’s knowing the people and the place - the faces at parties and parades, chats at the park - have you seen what’s blooming in the garden on the corner that those two women have been tending for decades? It’s beautiful.
There’s extending ourselves. Dropping off prescriptions for friends, making festival banners and coaching youth sports and cutting flowers for a neighbor. Sitting on a board and starting a business, feeding folks, getting people to sign petitions, checking on elders, going to meetings to try and keep developers in check. Humans extending care to thrive in community sounds a lot like trees weaving together a network of reciprocity below ground.
The place itself can root us, too - the way a neighborhood is laid out, how it invites you to spend time in it. If the Arboretum is the smartly cultivated head of my neighborhood, planned and cared for with intention and expertise, the Southwest Corridor Park is its spine: a green ribbon tying the neighborhood together; a connective landscape, writes Karilyn Crockett, author of People Before Highways: Boston Activists, Urban Planners, and a New Movement for City Making.
This spine - this central support structure of our place - was almost an highway. Since my life is essentially organized around the park - I can see it as I type - I try to never lose sight of this fact. That this community would not exist as it does if a grassroots group of residents didn’t come together to shut down the government’s plan to build an expressway to downtown Boston through our neighborhood. Thank you Black activists in the City of Boston for being the organizing force behind the existence of my backyard.
For over 40 years, since the Southwest Corridor became a park instead of a highway, filled with networks of trees and people, the community has thrown a festival in commemoration. Last weekend, I put on my flower crown and joined the neighborhood at the Wake Up the Earth festival, with its stilt-walkers and giant puppets and drums and dancing and music and art.
I can’t think of a better way to feel connected to a very specific place with a very specific story - in a kind of ecstatic celebration with people, along this green ribbon with roots extending both above and below ground. Well, there’s also the quiet ecstasy you can feel when hanging out with flowering trees on a sun-dappled hillside, soaking in their offerings.
Spend enough time thinking about what trees offer us - utility, beauty (Oh petals floating to the ground!), inspiration for interconnection - and you might start to adore them, see them as members of your community, fight for them just as you’d fight to keep a highway out of your neighborhood. And when trees and people are interconnected, well - networks galore! Perhaps we’re even working toward a world that integrates, rather than separates, humans and non-humans. As Macfarlane wrote in Underland,
If there is human meaning to be made of the ‘wood wide web,’ it is surely that what might save us as we move forward into the precarious, unsettled centuries ahead: mutualism, symbiosis, the inclusive human work of collective decision-making extended to more-than-human communities.
On that note, I love you and trees too.
XO
Leigh
Yes, it's a love letter
Love you, too! This is a beautiful rooted piece.