When I was little, the garden of my elementary school featured a young birch, at the centre of the southern corner of the courtyard. Me and my best friend were in love with fantasy movies, and we were taken aback by the talking trees of The Lord of the Rings, so we thought that we had to make friends with them and maybe, some day, they’ll feel comfortable enough with us to move and talk in our presence. Once, when some parent’s car parked on one of the roots of our precious birch, bruising it and tearing the white, papery bark that we hugged at least once a day, we took three break times in a row entirely to medicate the exposed root with musk and barks of other trees.
It is now evident to me that, rather than being in love with trees in general, we particularly longed for that particular birch. The other trees, although way bigger and tougher, surely did not appreciate us skinning them for the sake of our not-so-endangered friend (trees don’t die for a scraped root, science says).
All this is to say that I love trees, they are definitely my favourite beings. I love them more than flowers, and way more than humans. Therefore, when I found out that science was about to communicate with them, I was out of my mind. Stunned. Mesmerised. Moved to tears, almost.
If a tree falls in the forest, and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?
This is one of the most famous philosophical questions in western society. It is also the first sentence that came to my mind when I first heard about the recent human endeavour to decipher the language of trees. Trees have always been connected between each other somehow, like the mother-tree-thing from Cameron’s Avatar. Through electric impulses that resemble the activity that happens between the neurons in our brain, trees dialogue. They inform each other on where the water is, they exchange knowledge of their location in order to distribute better on the ground.
Not only via roots, but also via branches. There is one particular phenomenon that blew my mind when I heard of it. It is called ‘crown shyness’. According to Ludwig, this astonishing effect is:
A phenomenon where the canopy of trees or leaves do not touch each other, leaving gaps and spaces between them. It is a commonly used term in forest ecology and can be used in a variety of written contexts, such as scientific papers, nature writing, and creative writing. Example: "The lush forest was filled with a beautiful display of crown shyness, as the tall trees stood respectfully apart, allowing the sun's rays to filter through the gaps and create a mesmerising pattern on the forest floor.
Scientists still don’t know exactly how or why this happens, but what is clear is that trees organise to maximise their exposure to light, without shadowing their mates. Plus, they keep social distance to reduce the risk of contaminating each other with blight or parasites.
Amazing, isn’t it?
Do trees still have a language, if we don’t hear them? Of course.
Now scientists are making a strong effort to caption their talk and answer. I’ll explain to you how, be aware that my science talk is rather rudimental. I am a humanist afterall.
Basically trees are all connected underneath the ground surface: their roots exchange impulses via a sort of hi-fi network made of a symbiotic fungi, a system called mycorrhizal network, which spreads from the roots of one tree and sticks to another, generating a sort of fungi-fabric that delivers useful nutrients and chemicals from one tree to the other, making a forest looking like a brain. There is a cool TEDed about it, with pictures and drawing, if you find my exposition confusional (and I wouldn’t blame you).
The forest as a macroscopic brain has been studied by scientists for decades now, and the results, despite being still rudimental, are showing. Through digital tools, researchers are recepting electric impulses from the ‘forest-brain’ and are trying to code the impulses to decipher the messages. They are, basically, overhearing conversation between trees and trying to translate.
Once they will be able to translate and understand the information shared between the trees, the researchers will try to reproduce the messages and… spark up a conversation with them.
Can you imagine gossiping with a weeping willow? I could tell my old birch in the school garden my name, and it could answer me back with it. I wonder what the tree-language sounds like. Do they have accents? Dialects? I bet they do. I just can’t wait to learn Birchese. And you, which tree language would you love to learn?
Apart from my overreaction to the topic, this discovery, involving thousands of biologists, linguists, philosophers, physicists (and more) could be the path for a new understanding of nature. Understanding how trees react to wildfires, to draughts, to floods, how they choose where to move (yeah, forests move).
And, most of all, if language is the vehicle of culture, what could we learn if we shared a communication channel with our green friends? I just can’t wait to find out.
What about you? Are you scared that your cactus would start gaslighting you, or you can’t wait to gossip with your bonsai?
Jokes apart, is interspecies communication around the corner, or are we just looking at a dead end?
Let us know what you think!
Cheerio.
