The Time of Trees

The philosopher Deleuze famously used a tree to symbolise the kind of centralised systems of thought and power he rejected. He opposed it to the decentred network of the fungal rhizome. The tree represents hierarchy.

I think Deleuze was profoundly wrong.

Above ground, trees are both part of wider complex ecosystems, and ecosystems in themselves. They host a huge range of complex relationships with birds, mammals, insects, other plants and fungi. They provide a structure in which different niches of life can form, but they are also dynamic. In their seasonality, their colonisation, their death and decay, they feed shifting patterns of growth.

Below ground, hidden away, the opposition of tree to rhizome looks even more untenable. Tree roots form symbiotic relationships with fungi in vast mycorrhizal networks. These form exchange conduits for organic and inorganic nutrients, as well as linking whole populations of trees together in subterranean fungal whispers of communication.

Walking through Black Wood today, I wondered if part of the reason for Deleuze’s prejudice was the different temporality of trees. Some, of course grow quickly; but the impression of the moment can be one of stasis, a fixed and rooted identity.

This is a very reductionist view, of course. Trees are in a state of continual development. They exist on a threshold of living and dead wood. They challenge us with a deep temporality – not as slow as geological formations, but one which inevitably escapes our immediate grasp. Here, time fills space in the steady expansion of the tree’s height and bulk. But there is no permanence. I was struck by how many trees had come down in the recent storms – some of them great behemoths which looked as if they never could be moved. The long growth of the tree is not immune to sudden revolutions.

A rite of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids encourages meditation on the different aspects of trees – roots, trunk and branches – as linked to past, present and future. This may seem a fanciful piece of human imagination, but we always have to start with imagination to reach out to what is other. The meditation helps to expose us to a strange temporality, to relativise our own anthropocentric perspective, even if that is where we must start.

If all our thinking about nature is simply an imposition of categories drawn from human experience, we will only imprison it, and subject it to our control again. We need to form different networks of thought, touch and spirit, to become entangled with the slow branching life of trees, if we are to appreciate the gifts they bear.