A Life of A Walnut Tree

Tree Doctor

There is a walnut tree in my yard that is more than 500 years old. I did not know that my landlady Barbara, whom I live with in the house, has contracted a tree doctor to look after her aging tree until one afternoon, in the guest room, a smiling elderly man came up and introduced to me as such. In fact, he has cured her walnut tree of a serious ailment some twenty years ago. At the time, its topmost growth suddenly died, twigs hung limply from the branches, and the insects and fungi attacked it with little resistance on its part. There was a general unwellness that the walnut tree exhibited, and my landlady, who just moved into the house, picked up the subtle SOS signal that the tree sent out.


Barbara, at the time, was an antique collector whose day job was to visit old houses about to be demolished, and to acquire household items that would seem worthless to unkeen eyes, such as dusted fireplaces or discarded lamps. In her hands, those objects came back to life with their previously hidden features amplified and embellished. Barbara has a wonderful sensitivity to things whose potentials are compromised. In a shrewd response to her walnut tree´s impending demise, Barbara summoned a tree doctor, who came to rescue the second day. The diagnosis was that the walnut tree could not secrete enough chemicals against the insects.

Usually, walnut trees produce a potent chemical compound that would ward off insects with a level of ferocity that all trees would envy. This is why some garden lovers install a bench under a walnut tree where they are least likely to be bitten by mosquitos. In fact, walnut trees are so good at secreting chemicals that they prevent competing vegetation from growing and that no astute gardeners would plant flowers or vegetables close to them. But at this critical juncture, the very pride of this walnut tree ceded to a sense of humiliation. When a beetle bited into its fresh leaf, it could no longer turn its leaves bitter to sabotage the invaders´ appetite, or emit chemicals into the air that would repel them at a distance.

We did not know the precise cause of its ailment, so I could only suppose it normal that this over 500-years-old walnut tree has suffered from its old age. After all, a 500-years-old tree would equal to a 100-year-old human being. If the most virile man could not escape the fate of impotence after a century, then it is only normal that a tree suffers a similar fate. As a remedy, the tree doctor prescribed an injection at the roots. He dug six feet under the soil and exposed the deepest roots. In Chinese, a male sexual organ is described as one’s ¨life root¨. If our walnut tree could feel any human emotion, then a humiliation could well be its emotional response with its most private parts now exposed to public. But the choice between humiliation and death was a no brainer, providing that we grant our walnut tree an ability to choose. The doctor fed the medicine into its roots using injectors not unlike the ones that our nurses used for our buttocks, except that it was not just one injector for a tree, but at least five, that administered the medicine on all sides of the roots. The same treatment was applied again later in that day. According to Barbara, the walnut tree shined its healthy look few weeks later.

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War

But this was not the first time that this walnut tree has suffered a health issue, nor was it the first time that it has received a caring treatment. Before my landlady bought this property 27 years ago from Trinity University (Footnote 1), the family of a Trinity economics professor lived here for more than thirty years. Barbara has not met the professor, but his son, now quite aged himself, one day drove into the yard, brought along his wife and daughter, and showed them where he grew up. I was not there when his car pulled in, otherwise I would have asked him about a strange feature on the walnut tree that I had been curious about -- on the trunk there are several openings that are sealed from inside by concrete.

Without a first-hand account, I could then only surmise. Those panels appear to be installed in the place of the wounds as the aftermath of fallen branches. Grown up in the sub-tropical weather of southern Texas, the walnut tree has endured countless violent storms. It must be during one of those stormy days that some thick branches broke off from the trunk and left wounds as wide as 15 inches. Exposed to the air and rain, the damp wound was an ideal landing site for fungal spores that would soon make a meal of the wood. Their plan was to advance into the sapwood where the sap flows, exposing it to air, and drying it out. Without the sap, the tree could not mobilise its chemicals to counteract the attack, or simply drown them. When the fungi penetrate the sapwood into the heartwood, they would hollow out the tree like a stovepipe. Then there would be nothing that it could do.
Our walnut tree, however, was not without a chance to turn the tide. If it could seal its wound in time, then its sapwood would be saturated again and thus kill the fungi. The stake of this war lied on timing --- whether the healing would outpace the fungi´s attack. However, at the very beginning, our walnut tree was doomed to a defeat, because it would take fungi five years to advance into the heartwood, while on the tree’s side, it would take more than 40 years to heal a 15 inches wound! So if it were not for the interference of the Trinity University economics professor, who had paid a precious attention to the well-being of a tree, it would not still see the light few decades later. The professor, whose name neither I nor Barbara know, must have also hired a doctor who sealed the open wound with concrete panels to keep the sapwood moisturized and fungus-resistant.

Friendship

Two weeks ago, during Hurricane Harvey, one younger walnut tree snapped, its corpse fell onto the ground, in the middle of the night, making a thudding sound that worried us all. Seeing the fallen tree the second day, we were sad, but its passing away also came as a blow to its friends and families in its vicinity. While humans tend to project our villain image onto the trees, seeing them as competitors for sunlight and waters, trees also form friendship, and they support each other more often than compete. Underground, trees bond with each other by either intertwining the roots, or being connected through fungal networks, which creates a so-called “Wood Wide Web”. Through the network, they exchange nutrients and water. When one tree is weak, others support it, agreeing that when the misfortune falls on them, other trees would do the same. The “survival of the fittest” principle that humans so easily buy into would appear senseless with trees. A tree can only be as strong as its forest. Together they create a microclimate that sustains the right humidity and temperature.

Even though this hill is no longer a forest, these walnut trees retain their evolutionary instinct to seek bonds --- in a reverse but structurally analogous way that humans seek the most insignificant excuse to start a war. I would love one day to visit a planet whose conscious life form is tree beings, rather than human beings. Averting wars, loving to share, these pensive beings must have built an advanced, harmonious civilization. There, the social inequality must also be less an issue, because as trees, they tend to keep even the weakest among them as long as possible.

The German forester Peter Wohlleben has once stumbled upon a stump that is a remnant of a tree died at least five hundred years ago, but remarkably, it is still alive. Such an existence is practically impossible because the trees obtain the sugar and other nutrients through photosynthesis that could only be possible with leaves. This stump, then, must be fed in other ways --- by the roots of its neighboring trees. I then have the reason to believe that this tree, snapped in the hurricane, is not clinically dead, that we have no reason to be sad. Its stump would probably live few hundred more years than us, because its family and friends would never forsake it. Perhaps, I want to believe, I am also part of their alliance. Sometimes I woke at three or four in the morning. The complete darkness felt threatening. Then at the thought that a tree’s roots grow twice as wide as its crown, I felt consoled that I was sleeping above the roots of my walnut tree, that my “roots” were somehow intertwined with its roots, and that no evil could unfold under the tree’s watch.  

(my cat) 

Dying

But it is undeniable that my walnut tree is dying. The new barks kept growing, but, as if in a gesture of nostalgia, it refused to shed its old skins. The accumulating layers of old barks cracked way down into the younger barks, forming a deeply furrowed skin like a choppy water. One day, any main branch could break off from the trunk. At that time, after my landlady Barbara sells the house, would the new occupants care to heal its wound? And would they do it in time so that no fungi would encroach its heart? But like every being else, death is inevitable. One day it will return to humus, and yet even then, its decomposition will continue to be of service to its friends, families and neighbours for the few centuries to come. A life of a walnut tree that has seen a nation borne, endured treacherous storms, but also been loved by humans, and served, would be broken down into primordial elements that one day would be scattered around the universe. In Buddhism, we believe in reincarnations. I hope then parts of our walnut tree would be reborn in that planet of tree beings where each is endowed with a self-awareness. There, he could finally remember, and reflect upon so many of his past lives, including this one on Earth.

Books Consulted

Wohlleben, Peter, et al. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World. David Suzuki Institute, 2016.