The Grove of Sebastiano

by Scott Rhode

An olive-scented breeze rustles the cypresses at Sebastiano

monastery. The grove has been protected from human encroachment since the monks became its caretakers in 1486. Each day, without fail, the monks spend their waking hours within the grove, chanting as they have for centuries. I am counting on that constancy to see my research to its conclusion. I may not live to see the results, but future generations of Sebastiano's residents will. They will be the ones to discover if the trees have learned to recognize human intelligence. The whisper of the cypresses is the only sound as the monks interrupt their chanting. They are returning to the abbey for their midday meal. I am waiting in Sebastiano's dining hall. All the monks know of my visit is that an unnamed benefactor has supplied a grant for the world's foremost expert in dendrochronology to use their monastery as the site of a long-term study. Left for me to explain is how the monks can help me interpret the coded messages found in the growth rings of trees. *****

Everyone knows that the cross-section of a tree shows rings that

correlate with the growing conditions when the rings formed. And everyone is wrong. The thickness of the rings is not dictated by climate but is a conscious expression of the tree itself. But trees aren't conscious. That's something else everyone knows. Marlin Dykstra knew it, though he will admit to talking to trees from time to time. Not much human contact near his 50-acre tract in the piney slopes of British Columbia. Perhaps that's why he expected the trees to talk back.

"They say I'm in love with trees. Not so," Dykstra told me one day while cleaving a log with an 8-pound splitting maul. "I don't shed a tear for fallen timber. I cut 'em down myself to build my house, to heat it in winter. They're my livelihood." The clearing around Dykstra's cabin is decorated with half-finished examples of the erotic sculptures he carves for sale at local flea markets. While he turns trees into fetishes, he does not fetishize trees. If he had not killed as many as he had, he would not have discovered what they were saying. He continued chopping as he recalled: "I was watching a beetle crawl on a log," he said as he pointed to the corner of his one-room cabin. "Yeah, I was nude at the time, but that doesn't matter. It was springtime, and I was thinking -- not much to do around here but think. That beetle was crossing those growth rings, like walking through time. Then it crossed onto the log below it." Dykstra stopped chopping and moved to the spot. "The rings are different. Here's the thing: I felled these trees myself. I know exactly where they grew. I know exactly when they died. Those rings should be the same, but they ain't." Throughout the next spring and summer, Dykstra collected data from the trees on his property. The proof he needed was all around him. When he had gathered a persuasive portfolio, he began reaching out to the professionals. Someone told him Dr. Lupe Dominguez could make sense of his findings. I was in love with trees. As a girl, anyway. In the introduction to my first textbook, I stated that trees represent "the strength and sturdiness my father could not provide." I also credited the swaying of willow branches and the swirling of oak leaves with inspiring me to become a dancer. In truth, by that point I had forgotten exactly why I ever found trees fascinating in the first place. I never did become a dancer; I became a scientist. I've known thousands of trees in excruciating detail. By the time I reached the top of the field, the passion had been snuffed out. Whatever living poetry had captured

my interest had been pushed aside by dry botanical terminology. Dykstra's entreaty was the spark that re-ignited my zeal. He e-mailed me eight times before I took notice. I've told him that attaching a photo of himself was his first mistake. The photo shows Dykstra, white beard dangling from his chin like Spanish moss, wearing a green flannel shirt and fisherman's cap, his face a grim estimation of academic propriety, pointing to a log of no apparent significance. I was the last one in on the joke. My assistant had treated his e-mail as junk, so I never saw them. I first heard about him at a conference in Rio de Janiero when a colleague asked me about this weird Canadian who was contacting every plant biologist in the Western Hemisphere, it seemed. When he contacted me a ninth time, I only read the message to see what the laugh was about. And I did smile when I saw Dykstra's data, but not from amusement. I marveled at the elegance of his evidence and the enormity of his conclusion. As quickly as I could, I traveled to British Columbia and roamed Dykstra's 50 acres taking core samples of living trees. I gathered specimens from 786 pines, firs, cedars, birches, and alders within a kilometer of Dykstra's cabin, 1016 elsewhere in Canada, 3452 altogether from everywhere I went. I enlisted colleagues around the world to take core samples. I accessed my own historical database and re-examined every museum sample I could get my hands on. I combined the patterns of treering thicknesses into a single computer model. At first, I sifted through the data using Dykstra's own home-brewed algorithm, then later I refined it into a more robust instrument. Every way I tried, regardless of where the specimens came from, Dykstra's result appeared -- a result no one had ever seen because they assumed rings correlated with nothing but age. But we had the data to back it up. Trees invented binary code eons before Leibniz. Messages are formed by alternating the growth of wider, lighter springwood and narrower, darker latewood. In effect, the vascular cambium has been co-opted as an organ of

expression, embedding messages in the secondary xylem. Patterns of alternating rings recur within a single tree and across species, patterns statistically unlikely to appear by chance. They are words. However, the words are not discrete units. The ending of one "word" forms the beginning of the next. This is one feature that sets tree language apart from human language. The other difference is that tree language could not have developed as a form of communication, for only in death can a tree's code be revealed. The trees are, in a sense, humming to themselves, composing private odes and manifestos. Of course, there are places where large swathes of trees have their growth rings synchronized. This had long supported the illusion that the rings recorded annual changes in climate. Instead, they appear to be choruses sharing a communal refrain. Whether the members of the choir are in direct contact with each other or whether their common output is the result of living in similar circumstances, sharing a similar insight, we have not been able to determine conclusively. Anyone seeking wisdom from the trees is bound to be disappointed, for their solitary compositions have no application to human experience. They live too long and altogether too slowly. Humans are as transitory to them as the lichens on their bark or the moths resting on their branches. This has not stopped pilgrims from camping on the edge of Dykstra's woods, now a shrine to their new creed of harmony between the living kingdoms. But true believers are a trifling minority. Even those who acknowledge the reality of the phenomenon still struggle to make the further leap of attributing intelligence to plants, according to polls. Few people view forests differently than they had before, not as stands of dumb lumber but as vast libraries populated by unique authors. "I might make take a moment to acknowledge that cutting a tree is interrupting a sonnet or a symphony in progress," Dykstra told me. "But business is business. People need wood." The chill of October descended on Dykstra's cabin as he chopped another log. "Gotta keep warm somehow."

*****

While others probe the mystery of how trees evolved this code and
others try to pinpoint the seat of vegetable consciousness, the focus of my research lately has been deciphering the language of trees. Conifers, I've found, have an accent distinct from angiosperms, preferring to speak with thin rings of dense latewood. They really have the most beautiful texts, given that conifers had a several-hundred million year head start against eudicots and magnoliids, whose utterances are clumsy and crude by comparison. Like the scribbles of children, really. Though the fact that different divisions of Plantae converged on the same encoding mechanism and even the same language is remarkable in itself. I hesitate to suggest it might be a learned behavior, but the evidence is tantalizing. Subject matter varies greatly, though there are regional preferences. Tropical trees expound on the ease of life in terms so languid they scarcely show growth rings at all. They rarely tell the horror stories composed in temperate, wildfire-prone forests. The heavily-polluted woods of Eastern Europe often share a lament for their poisoned soil, and the map of this theme correlates strongly with the boundaries of human government regulation. Arboreal literature can be classified into motifs of fear, loneliness, or ecstasy, although these words are applied by analogy without any certainty that they have the same meaning for the trees. For all my stature in the field, I have not persuaded my colleagues that the code can be translated. While the fact of the code is unmistakable, few believe humans will ever know what the trees are saying. For that, we would need the equivalent of a Rosetta Stone. And I'm certain I've found it, here in the grove of Sebastiano. In the xylem of the cypresses, the rings encode the same chant the monks have been singing for over 500 years, as if the trees have been parroting the cadence. By mapping each word of the chant to each "word" of the code, I produced a lexicon that allowed me to make sense of tree language worldwide.

How can I be so sure my interpretation is correct? I've come to Sebastiano to test my hypothesis. I must convince the monks, in the name of science, to forsake their traditional chant and select a new one. If the trees are listening, they will respond by echoing the new melody. In time, it may even lead to a rich dialogue. But contact across the kingdoms will not come easily. Human generations flicker in the span of a single sentence of the arboreal language. Sebastiano has been continually inhabited for 500 years. Perhaps another 500 will be long enough.