Arborist Anthem

I checked my notes, wondering where to go from here since it seemed we were at an impasse. This was Day 94, and Dendro, as I had nicknamed it, had gone silent. At least, as far as I could tell from a tree.

There had been spotty reports, or local legends, really, from various locations around the world—Costa Rica, China, Russia—but no one had ever been able to find one of these allegedly “intelligent” self-aware trees until my research team dug one up in the nearby Sehachie Forest and brought it to our lab. Fortunately for us, Dendro was only fifteen feet tall. Our two-story facility sported a lobby spanning both floors with a glass skylight dome that allowed the tree to fit with inches to spare.

Learning to communicate with Dendro was hard at first, not that we were expecting a mouthy Wizard of Oz-style tree with arms that threw apples. We eventually discovered that if we asked it a question, tiny new roots would curl out from its base if the answer was “yes,” but there’d be no activity if the answer was “no.”

That little development almost went unnoticed until one of my colleagues, Syd, jokingly poked the tree’s trunk with a pen and asked if that hurt. To our astonishment, the first little root curled out right in front of our eyes. Buoyed by that success, Syd tried alternating poking the tree with various objects and just gently touching it instead. He’d ask if each action caused pain, and the results were always the same—a new root for “yes,” no new growth for “no.”

I suggested that we try giving it different types of liquids or nutrients since I was getting a little uncomfortable with the poking and prodding. This was even more successful and led to a little carpet of new roots spreading out from the base of the tree. In some ways, it felt a little like watching a toddler grow and learn as it explored its surroundings, except our team determined this particular tree was likely thirty years old.

But the questioning in general opened up a gaping hole in our experiments, namely, how was the tree understanding us? Another colleague, Martin, suggested some form of telepathy, and as strange as that sounded, I couldn’t offer up anything more scientific. It wasn’t as if the tree had grown up around humans or gone to school to learn our language.

Martin then got the idea to start asking more philosophical questions, and that’s when things got a little weirder. The first questions were easy enough. “Do you know what you are?” No roots. Or, “Do you know that you are different from us?” Tiny roots. And, “Do you know where you are?” No roots.

As the only woman on the team, I knew the others often joked behind my back about me being overly emotional at times. “You’re getting too attached to the subject,” they argued. “You must remember it’s not like it’s human, it’s just a plant.” But I ignored all of that and decided to ask the tree, “Are you lonely?”

In reply, Dendro sent out one of the longest roots I’d ever seen. I thought I must have imagined it, but the lab’s cameras recorded everything, and it was definitely on the playback. That was a week ago, and the tree had remained silent to our queries ever since. Naturally, Martin, Syd, and the others blamed me for my unscientific question. So, I tried giving Dendro more of its favorite nitrogen fertilizer food, extra water, and even a little trunk massage hoping it would help. But still no new roots.

The team usually took Sundays off, leaving the tree by itself, but maybe I was feeling a little guilty so I had the idea of going in the late afternoon to see if Dendro was okay. My guilt intensified as I paused briefly at the entrance to the building and noted all the other trees outside in their natural habitat, including an elm where I’d hung wind chimes tuned to the A-minor pentatonic scale. As I went inside and stood looking up at Dendro, I racked my brain trying to come up with something that might break through our communication “logjam.”

Then I had an idea. No one had tried using music yet, even though various researchers decades ago experimented with playing music to plants to see if it helped them flourish. I started with a little Bach to see if there was any reaction. I didn’t see any new roots, but there was a hint in the air of something I couldn’t quite explain, almost as if the tree itself was humming. I switched to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and the humming sensation seemed to intensify, like a pulsing of energy throughout the lab.

The pulsing soon took on a deeper frequency that I could feel in my bones. Just as I thought I should turn off the Beethoven, the ground beneath the lab shuddered. I’d been through a Southern California earthquake before, but this felt different. Very different. 

Oh, dear god, what had I done? Had I totally wrecked the experiment? And what in heaven’s name should I do now? 

Even though the slightly-freaked human in me wanted to run out the door, the scientist in me wanted to stick around and document whatever was going on. The audio player suddenly switched off on its own due to the shaking, but with luck, the lab’s cameras were still video recording everything. I grabbed my cell phone anyway, just in case.

As the shaking increased and I tried desperately to hang on to a wall with one hand while holding the phone in the other, cracks appeared in the floor. They branched out into patterns that gave way to larger openings as tree root after tree root burst through. But these roots weren’t stretching out from Dendro, they were stretching out toward Dendro.

The floor under us buckled and heaved upward, and I finally ran for the nearest door and escaped out onto the grassy field next to the lab. As I watched with a mixture of fear and awe, I heard the staccato sounds of glass breaking as Dendro’s crown of branches and leaves thrust upward through the skylight dome and toward the sun.

Ever so gradually, the rumbling and shaking died down until I heard only the sounds of bird calls and the wind chimes hanging from the elm. Against my better judgment, I slipped inside the building once more, where Dendro’s roots were now interlocked with the roots from below.

I gingerly crept toward the tree, even though I could no longer see the whole of Dendro, with its crown now poking through the remains of the skylight. I picked my way around the glass shards and stared at the interlocked roots.

I asked, “Are you no longer lonely, Dendro?”

Silence. And then a new root tendril curled toward me until it touched the tip of my shoe.

I walked over to the desk with the audio device that had turned itself off during the upheaval and switched it back on. Then I sat on an uncracked part of the floor as Dendro and I— and Dendro’s new friends—listened to Beethoven together.