The Secret Life of Trees | Q&A with Melina Watts

Helen Denham: What initially sparked your curiosity around nature and trees?

Melina Watts: Great question. I think from infancy on, people are taught that modern culture sets humanity apart from nature, as if we are not evolved from fish, not kin to chimpanzees, not dependent on other living things for every bite of food we eat. Of course we are! So when did I connect to that truth? One of my earliest memories is being in the car as my parents drove along a road somewhere between L.A. and Central California through gorgeous grassy fields with big white fences, horse country.  Evidently, I was transfixed and my mother, who was not an animal person at all, saw that I was enchanted and asked my dad to pull the car over and walk me up to go see the horses. He held me up at his chest height to the top rail and the horses came by.  Big tall two year olds, probably Thoroughbreds.  One popped his head over the fence to greet me and breathed on me. I can still remember that his head was taller than I was then.  And those enormous brown eyes, glowing with kindness, verve, and intelligence. I patted his smooth fur and he breathed on me and we connected.  I had this deep sense that we were befriending one another.

So I have always felt, in my soul I felt this idea that animals were … other … was just wrong.  They are us and we are them. I will also add that the line between domestic and wild animals is more slender than we think.  But it is trees that call to my core. So plants… plants are my spirit animal. I remember from earliest childhood that green was my favorite color because plants are green and I loved grass and leaves and trees and flowers and ferns. I cannot state what sparked my curiosity around nature and trees because the outdoors called me like a siren wooing a sailor, I would never have stayed away.

I can definitely remember falling in love with specific plant species or ecosystems or places but as to the whole, it was asking me to come out and play and I never even tried to resist.  There are these moments that stand out…I was working at a stable my sophomore year at UCLA and riding a mare bareback back to the stable, looking up at few clouds lost in a vast blue sky when I smelled the most exquisite roses I have ever smelt. It was so astonishing I nearly fell off the horse. It was at a pond in Topanga State Park and I saw these tiny pale pink roses with a single layer of petals and the most intense scent I’ve ever encountered. At the time, I thought it might have been left over from early settlers. but I later found out it was rosa Californica, our own native rose.  Discovering at the lofty age of nineteen that we have wild roses in California sort of threw me into the realization of how little I knew about the individual plants that were connecting with me when I hiked or rode, so I launched into learning about what our local ecosystem and the plants who live here. The more you learn, the more you see when you look at a landscape – and the more you want to learn. My curiosity is infinite.

HD: What do you understand the intelligence of trees to be like?

MW: I prefer to think of it as … sentience.  Trees can feel and they can communicate wants and needs with each other in ways that scientists are starting to be able to track. The research of Dr. Suzanne Simard shows that trees can communicate using fungal underground neural networks…and that they are able to share water and nutrients. They do this across species, so it’s a neighborly altruism, not just a me and mine thing. To me, the word intelligence implies that we (as humans) value certain kinds of thinking, like being able to do math at a high level, and intelligence is something we rank, when we give what we see as certain kinds of functionality higher ratings. Just this idea that some people are smarter than others is problematic, the older I get, the more I listen, the more humble I am.

Intelligence comes in so many forms. I gave this talk on how I think trees influenced the enlightenment of the Buddha­ that summarizes many of the things I think the Buddha learned from trees, and those lessons were spiritual, lessons in how to be, how to co-exist with the transience of life, how to live with decay and new life and be celebratory in spite of ephemera. What I see is that trees are wise which is a different thing than intelligent. Wise, to me, means using thinking to make choices that benefit individuals and the larger whole.  Trees are all about ecosystem thinking. Capitalist values are literally the opposite: nature is treated as a bunch of commodities to be used until no longer available.  Trees are about building, preserving, and increasing the greater good for a shared community. I don’t want to act like a rich old school factory owner, I want to think like a forest.

HD: How do trees communicate?

MW: This is a two part question. How do they communicate to one another and … how do they communicate to us? Trees communicate to one another by the world wood web, where they push electrical messages through their roots into fungal networks which slowly transmit them to other trees which then transmit messages back. These same networks are used to transport water and food, including to revered older trees that are in trouble or to infant trees which are under the shade line and are not yet able to photosynthesize enough. Trees use tree pheromones to communicate with one another, we experience this as scent which may be why we just adore certain plant scents so much – it’s literally the language of love in some cases.

But to us, how can trees communicate with us? I can explain what happened to me once with a field of grass – and then you can transpose that to trees, where the same thing happens but on a larger scale. Trees are bigger so, probably more loud and thus mor4e accessible. Try sitting next to a large tree in the summer and put your hand on it. You may be able to feel its sap moving slowly up and down. Put your energy out at the tree as greeting. Then be patient and wait for energy to come back at you. Trees are deep and slow and emotional. They’ll connect with you if you let them.

HD: How can we more deeply connect to nature in our daily lives?

MW: Planting native plants is a vital way to connect to nature.  Growing Works in Camarillo, Matilija Nursery in Moorpark and Thedore Payne are some local places to get them. Hiking or swimming in natural bodies of water connects us to nature. Learning the names of local plant and animal species is a huge step to connecting to nature. If you don’t know the names of the plants, riding through Topanga is simply experiencing varieties of colors of green and gold and brown. Beautiful uplifting but not connecting necessarily. Once you start to know the names of plants, about their life cycles, their historic uses, which other species rely on them, suddenly they have personalities and it becomes a forest of other living beings not just “the outdoors.” The more you know the more capacity you have to love. 

I feel like California needs to mandate that ecoliteracy is taught at each grade level and taught in a way that reflects the ecosystems of specific counties. Our trees and plants are different depending on where we stand. On a parallel note, I’d love to see us hiring First Nations peoples to teach their stories and culture in our public school. Their knowledge base of each local ecosystem is extraordinary and often changes our perspective on biodiversity.  I think we spend too much time thinking about people and different kinds of people. We need to expand our idea of community from all the people in the world to … all the living beings in the world. If we put this shared community of living beings in first place in our hearts and consider all other species before we make decisions, we can transform how humans exist on this planet.

Another thing that surprised me, half way through writing the novel, I went to a gallery up in Ojai and came upon the work of Jeff Sojka. He's a California plein air painter and his work has this quality as if he's felt the life, the constant energy, of the landscape, of the plants and trees, intensely and is showing us how this shared emotion feels by a visual representation of this intensity. Every plant seems to glow from within, you can feel the life shining from the inside of the plant out into the world, the sky is numinous, the colors are super rich. I went upstairs in the gallery and came upon a big painting of a large oak and I was transfixed. Somehow he had painted what I was feeling in my heart as I was inspired to write Tree. I couldn't talk, I just stood there gazing and gazing and gazing. Years later when I was ready to go print, I reached out to him for permission to use the painting on the cover and he said yes. It was one of the great moments of my life. Now the Museum of Ventura County is putting together a show, Going Wild, featuring a series of paintings by Sojka inspired by Tree. If we begin to see the world the way Jeff envisions it, biodiversity will thrive. Look at his paintings for long enough and you'll see ... magic is real ... life is the magic.

HD: What do trees have to teach us?

MW: Patience, perseverance, community. How to grow where you are planted.

HD: What is something that surprised you when you started studying trees?

MW: When you see, a tight circle of sycamores that look like friends? What some people might call a fairy circle? Those are often formed when a tree burns to the ground in a fire – yet the roots survive. In a process called stump-sprouting, the brave tree pops up new trees from several spots around its’ former self. They’re like phoenixes rising from the ashes.  Are they the same tree? Its children? That original tree re-incarnated?

HD: What's your favorite kind of tree and why?

MW: Andy Lipkis, who founded TreePeople asks every person he meets, “What’s your favorite tree?” He says he has yet to find a person who does not have an answer. I’ve started asking that question at book events and have heard so many beautiful answers. Sometimes I feel like I’m a plant-people therapist. I have always loved California Live oaks, all of them.  They feel like the other half of my soul. I cannot justify it or explain it, it’s primal. I do have one tree that cared for me during a time in my life in which great joy and terrifying darkness dominated.  It is a California Valley Oak located in Calabasas in Malibu State Park, about ¾ of a mile from DeAnza Park. It is the biggest California Valley Oak I have ever met. I often went to visit it when I was writing Tree and it was very sympathetic.  I have taken my children on mini-picnics there many times. I hugged it when I was pregnant with my daughter and it celebrated with me. And when every doctor I had met said my unborn son was going to die before he was born or die upon birth, this tree consoled me and told me he was alive… at least I had these conversations until  I was put on ten weeks of bedrest. (Said child has been on many hikes to meet this tree, which I really consider like a relative or guardian.) Finally, when the father of my two younger children had been … terrifying … the tree gave me courage to stand tall and grow.  And I’m still standing.  We’ll probably go see this tree on my birthday in June.  It’s good for all of us.