The Meaning of Trees

At the end of my garden there is an exquisite silver birch tree. It graces every season of the  year and tells every movement of the air with slender branches. Its ghostly trunk is stronger than it looks. This tree means so much to me. That last sentence is perfectly understandable: it’s about the tree’s value to me. It also suggests its function as a signifier of spring when coming into bud, of autumn when its leaves turn yellow. However, to ask the more abstract question, “What does a tree mean?” makes no sense, even though the question comes to us when thinking about all kinds of other things: words, actions, events. Even natural catastrophes. “What is the pandemic telling us?” But, as a philosophy student I was taught that to ask, “What does a tree mean?” is to make a category error. The kind of error a robot might make. Trees don’t speak, gesture, intend, though they undeniably have uses: we use them as fuel, as building material, as wind-shields. They give us fruit and pleasure. I’ve read that the silver birch is an excellent purifier of traffic-polluted air – ugly work for such a delicate tree. Sometimes a tree even makes something happen. The roots of a tree can, after all, cause a man-made wall to collapse. But it probably didn’t intend it.

Perhaps the question makes no sense because the tree herself can neither ask nor answer it. What if she could? It’s sad to imagine my silver birch asking herself what she means, asking what the meaning of her existence can possibly be: “Why am I here?” One possible answer, “You’re here to give me pleasure,” might not be enough to cure her existential angst.  Can her meaning – or mine? – be entirely in the gift of others?

I walk slowly down the garden and stand looking at my tree. Beyond her the plane trees [the sole living members of the family Platanaceae], poplars and sycamores have gathered with that listening quality characteristic of trees in the early evening. The air is very still. I see a new possibility.

Maybe asking, “What does my tree mean?” – a question only a robot would ask – is wrong because the tree is so beautiful. Is my tree’s beauty an end in itself and does being an end in itself mean there is no further meaning? The birch simply IS. Like happiness that you realise, often only in retrospect, is the taste on your tongue, the tune in your head, the man in your arms. By a strange paradox typical of life’s deepest – most meaningful? – moments: meaning arrives, like happiness itself, when we’re not looking.

Still the question nags. Not quite so much as the question, “What does life mean?” But still it nags.

And maybe those fleeting moments are significant in a different way from beauty, not as ends in themselves but as causes: happiness leads to kindness, sex to attachment and children, good eating to health, hard work to reward. Implicit in that suggestion is the idea that meaning can’t just be the fizz of pleasure in our chemicals that nature designed to keep us going. That in itself is as meaningless as a drug-induced high. The word “significant” has appeared and with it the idea of moral value (There are other perspectives on drug-induced highs – just one example: Aldous Huxley’s in The Doors of Perception, 1959).

Human brains seem wired not only to look for cause and effect in the material world  – “If I jump off the wall I’ll break my leg,” “the colour black in berries means poison” and so – but to look for signs that point beyond the prosaic and to feel diminished when it turns out there is no beyond. Many thinkers have concluded there is no given meaning to life; we have to create our own meanings to live by. “If there were no God we’d have to invent one (Feuerbach).”  As indeed we did, and with the gods came religion, and with religion an entire web of meanings to govern our physical and spiritual lives. Community spread from sharing food, security, and one another to all the rituals and celebrations of the religious calendar. The significance of major milestones in each individual life was celebrated communally and communal celebrations – such as the harvest – were deeply meaningful to each individual. A child might ask: Who made the apples? And an elder could reply: God. The child might go on to ask: Who made God? But there the questions had to stop. Perhaps it was the wrong question? Certainly, there was no answer except that of faith. And faith may be just what we don’t have.

I notice that the supple branches of my silver birch are all streaming to the right. That means the breeze – which I can’t feel at ground level – is coming from the west. I reflect on the meaning the tree has for me: I remember her as a sapling when we first came here, twenty years ago; now she acts as a landmark for walkers in the Park; I wait every winter for the first signs of spring in her, a green blush; in summer I like to spray the tree to seduce birds to come shower amongst the sparkling leaves. I am reminded of the many trees that have historic meaning, such as the oak in which the future King of England, Charles II, hid to escape the Roundheads following his defeat at the Battle of Worcester in 1651. I think of significant trees in myth, such as the immense Nordic ash tree, the sacred Yggdrasil, that is the centre of the cosmos, with its branches reaching far into heaven. For millions of other trees, deep personal meaning is attached to every branch, leaf and flower by those who know and love them.

And if my tree were moved to speak for herself? If she really is what she sometimes seems to be, a witness to our communality in time and space, what might she say? The fact is, to be a witness requires consciousness and, though we now know that tress communicate through their inter-connected root systems, though they respond to light, to threat and even noise, they don’t appear to have anything that could be called a brain and without a brain there is no consciousness.  Trees may “speak” to one another, but not to us.

Whilst trees arguably are communal, communicating beings, humans are unarguably so. We are social animals who live, work, survive, communally. Our intentions, desires and needs go beyond our individual selves. We live and move within a social web.

But for all that, we are also alone. Even when we share memories  – “Remember how we swam in the river together?” – only mine have that quality of “my-ness,” difficult to define but unmistakable. That old phrase comes to mind: alone in a crowd. Never more so than now when such a great part of human life is spent in only virtual community. Still, no matter how together IRL we are, no matter how skilled at communication, our subjectivity is rooted deep in our individual sensory and emotional experiences. We are alone in our mind-full subjectivity, an animal both communal and individual. We are also an animal that thinks. More than that, an animal with the habit of thinking abstractly; given to reflection on, for example, the nature of Time and Space.

Sometimes I fall prey to the debilitating power of the thought: “Life has no meaning any more than my lovely tree has meaning. To think otherwise is to fall into a category error.” I stand in a cold place where I’ve lost my sense of purpose, lost my sense of belonging. Meaning, purpose, belonging. Three powerful companions I walk arm in arm with have left me alone in the dark. A communal animal, alone, but thinking metaphysically at full throttle. It’s often supposed that humans are the only animal to suffer this type of angst. An image of baboons in Africa – so evocatively described in The Soul of the Ape by Eugene Marais – comes to mind: they are sitting, apart from one another, on an open mountain slope facing the setting sun in a mood of deep solitary meditation, or perhaps melancholy.

We are closer to baboons than robots.

At the interface between thought and the great timeless solitude in which we all move and have our being, the social animal we are still craves the sense of being part of a greater whole. Meaning may be something we have to find for ourselves but it is essentially something we find outside ourselves. When I have fallen into that mood where I celebrate nothing and see no meaning anywhere, when my capacity either to see or to make meanings has deserted me, trees allow me into their mysterious communality. They restore my human, moving, celebratory spirit in a different register: no intentions, no desires, no needs. No words. My mind is at its most alert, most receptive, but I STOP. The moment is one of brimming fullness and deep connection.

Is the meaning trees so powerfully suggest at such times mine? Or theirs? Or are they one and the same?