A Tree Comes in for the Winter
Writing prompts to kick start your creativity
We’re staying on the theme of trees for this month’s writing prompts. I have not one, not two, but three writing prompts for you to get your teeth into today! They are all designed to help you change perspectives and spark new ways of looking at familiar themes.
Did you know that trees communicate through a deep network of fungi called mycorrhizas? It’s thought that they exchange nutrients, emit warning signals, talk to each other through these fungal networks. Here’s a NY Times article about the initial research around mycorrizal communication and the next steps in research around tree communication.
Trees live in communities, and in their natural state they have a matriarch in a forest who ‘teaches’ the younger trees when to turn their leaves in autumn, when to grow their blossom, when to grow.
All this knowledge and yet for hundreds of years trees have been background, furniture, resource. So much of the world is unknown, so much of consciousness is unknown to us. It turns out that trees were communicating, on some level, with us all along. Have you ever felt like you were being watched as you stepped though the silence of a forest? This is most likely caused by you picking up on chemicals released from the trees that raise blood pressure and set off a feeling of uneasiness in humans. If the trees want you there, you’ll know it, if they don’t feel threatened by you, perhaps you can make friends with them.
In one set of experiments plants - Venus fly traps - were sedated, anaesthetised in order to see what ‘waking up’ looked like. It’s an interesting approach.
Did the plants wake up as we do when we come to after a general anaesthetic? This is the critical question, because in order to wake up, you need one thing above all others: consciousness. And it was exactly this question that a reporter posed to Baluška. I really liked his answer: “No one can answer this because you cannot ask [the plants].”
Here’s an interesting Guardian article about the potential for humans to communicate with trees.
But what do the trees think we are? Is our touch a breeze against the trunk, is our movement no more important than a squirrel, is our destruction of them, our chopping down of rainforests a natural disaster to them? I wonder if we’ll ever know.
Let’s kick off our writing prompts with a poem.