What is a Tree?

(This article was commissioned by A&F)

Connect to the ultimate reality of trees, 

through sweat, cold, and tiredness.

Walking

• Walking through a forest is a busy sensory experience. By their morphological complexity forests are mostly always different. Most are young and this increases the rush of green life at floor level, it is a tricky business making a path through all this, and not always a perfectly comfortable activity. Plants and insects damage our fragile outer organ and the forest itself often raises a sort of primeval angst. Be it noises, smells, or the towering height of trees. Fear of the unknown gives a mixed feeling of peace and danger, of one’s own mortality.

• Pushing through thickets of bracken in East Anglia, an ancient coppice woodland with similarly aged Sweet Chestnut trees are dotted around, their gnarled trunks exposing centuries of energetic lava like growth. They seem poised in silence until the moment these human eyes are diverted, free to continue their vital dance. Alone at dusk, the hour of gloaming, when shapes begat shapes and sensory capacities are naturally heightened.

• Ancient Buddhist and Shinto shrines share space at the end of Japans longest pilgrimage trail. I long to hold, until my death, the image of these mist drenched forests. A lone but massive bell peels powerful muted sounds. Six people perch on the edge of the world, until salty wind and sunlight bring a different clarity. I cannot believe the size, shape and age of these trees. I am unable to do more than touch my forehead against this tower of wood, close my eyes and try to imagine the track of time up to now. 200, 500, 700, 1300 years for a single living tree. Individual trees are renewable components, the forest has an unimaginably greater time frame, the rocks and water older still.

• A Beech tree exists in a coastal woodland of beech trees in Wales, this dale has been blown from time immemorial by the strong westerly Atlantic winds, sea foam cascading across it while the local woody structures respond to the forces of wind, rain, sunshine, and salt. Trees are more than just alive, they participate.

Throwing 

Those that have watched a baseball player throw and then quickly run outside to copy, realize that balls fall short, or veer high and off to one side and every time the action is different.  Each time the ball is thrown it moves differently and our body feels differently.  The sum of our action can not add up to the totality of the professional pitcher.  With clarity and precision how can they succeed to hit a target every time one is placed in front of them?  There is often superstition, routines before entering the game or lucky trinkets that must be worn to get the athlete into the ‘zone of excellence’.  These habitual actions and objects are psychological crutches that help to get lesser athletes in to a positive mental place.   The New York Yankees would have been stuffed if Don Larsen, in Game 5 of the famous 1956 World Series, had forgotten his lucky socks!

(I’m sure that he didn’t need them)

There is an elegance and poetry to any type of throwing.  A tree climbers intention is not to hit the tree with their missile but to strategically miss it, by millimeters .  We attach a soft, oblong weight of around 300 grams to a sixty meter long piece of thin rope, three millimeters in diameter.  The ‘throw-weight’ must miss the target branch and trail the long thin rope over the top of it, falling back again to the ground.  Like all throwing activities it is deceptively simple.

Moving around the tree I become aware of plants at floor level.  Some extend upwards ten meters or so, others are much smaller and while I need some room as I throw I do not want to disturb them too much, my philosophy of treading lightly in nature and leaving no trace begins here.  

Standing upon terra firma with neck cranked upwards I begin analyzing the shape of a forty meter Cryptomeria japonica.  It feels like I am trying to drink my eye balls.  The on-coming pain in my neck and the difficulty of breathing shake me, remind me to change posture and find a different angle to look from.  A tree of this height means that the uppermost point my climbing rope ties to will be around thirty six meters and that is a lot of branches to have to miss as I work out a route for my throwline.  As Don Larson, the pitcher for the New York Yankees, was able to throw with pin point precision into any millimeter of the required legal area I too must find openings through the dense crown of branches to slot my throw weight into.  

Baseball may be taken more seriously than my job but I know otherwise.  Don Larson may throw a foul pitch.  I could die.  To danger I am attuned, the space that I occupy must extend all around me, upwards to forty meters and depending on the condition of the forest this can create a three-dimensional mental box as wide as it is high.  

2020’s rainy season was extensive and there may be loosening of soil and heaviness of water inside the tree.  A weak branch so close to breaking point that it takes nothing more than a misplaced pull on my climbing rope to begin a cascading catastrophe.  

Finally my route is chosen, I find my spot.  The softness of the ground tells me that humans rarely come here, I can see years of fallen detritus rotting into the soil as mushrooms work their mycelial mats and the overwhelming musky aroma of this combined with the essential oils from the trees relaxes me.  I can begin throwing. My breathing slows as I try to relax my body while moving toward the throwline

Can I not become a part of this woodland system, even for these few hours?  

My disconnectedness seems out of place here and at times I feel embarrassed to be so lumpen and uncoordinated.  The intricacy of life from soil to tree top is overwhelming.  All these things are connected and nested in their webs and relationships.  Even if they do not touch the soil they get their sustenance from it in long chains of feeding.  I must transform my unwieldiness into something more delicate, and humbly step toward this climbing experience.

I look up again and think.  My feet, as though magnetized, are glued to the earth.  Every time I throw it is as if for the first time.  The act is a gage for my soulful and physical condition.  I realign myself around the instruction given from it.  Looking directly at where I want my line to fall over, I then extend my consciousness to this point.  I feel I can touch it and feel the texture of the bark and the nuance of the branches shape.  There is such concentration now that everything in the world falls away, even this huge tree in front of me no longer exists.  How my arm begins to move is still a mystery to me, but it does.  I feel the soles of my feet and my sluggish body come to life in movement.  One swing…. two …. release.  Coming out of this deep reverie I am back into my body and begin to control the speed and fall that the line takes.  

If my shot misses, no matter.  I use it to reset my internal sights and can usually get my target within three tries, though for me this is hardly the point.  Being able to experience the depth of this practice cleanses my soul and I feel slightly less shy to be in this beautiful place, with or without my lucky socks.

Trees live in time frames unlike our own.  An indescribable mass reaching out of the earth and adapted to growth toward the Sun.  They are children of the Sun and grow in spiraling and contorted ways to reach a glimpse of their yellow God.  Their radial symmetry belies this fact, up and up they go, twisting building blocks of cellulose and lignin, using one for sheer strength and the other for flexibility, tracing their history through the air on a journey towards light.

Cold. February. Matsumoto. 

It is deep winter and as I stand in this cold woodland I am reminded of my curse, of my weight on the earth, and the impossibility of truly connecting to the tree.  I reach inside my clothes to touch my belly, into my trousers, reaching for the top of my thigh, aware that time spent out of my gloves in this white land can be dangerous.  The snow is enticing.  Sound waves are deadened.  As my hands begin to warm the pain brings me closer to myself.  But my mind may easily wonder outwards, toward the tree again, where my throw line has reached a high and safe place.  A tree climbers rope system is silent, it allows movement all over its structure and is removed with no knowledge of ever being there.  There should be no damage left on the tree, surroundings or ourselves.

New life.  April.  Hakuba

The smell of Wild Parsley underfoot distracts me as I pack out my rope to the burgeoning spring floor.  The ropes bright colors denote safety but they are also simply beautiful, against this green and brown back drop.  I attach my rope to the throwline, being careful not to crush the Butterbur heads as I do.  The long winter meditation has ended, and as the mountain water flows it warms my spirit.  I slowly chew Spikenard shoots, letting the astringency sting my tastebuds, and again I am reminded of my body.  My consciousness seems to slip inside and outside of my self as I pull my rope into place toward the top of the tree.  Slipping in and out of my body is a skill that was never taught.

Heat.  June.  Tokamachi

I sit two meters above the earth, clipped into a climbing tool on an 11mm polyester rope.  I bounce a little and respond to the tension and release in the rope and the movement it induces in the tree; trees are acoustical dancers.  My small frame and gentle movements send shock waves rippling through the structure, out to every branch tip, through the trunk wood and into the root system.  I sit two meters above the earth but am still connected to it.  

The rainy season nears its end.  Soon it will be the hot Japanese summer.  Cicadas scream and I sweat inside my clothing.  My palms are clammy but this is good as the rope is easier to grip.  

My mind focuses, entirely inside my body now.  Raising my knees toward my chin I exhale and empty my lungs in the hope that I can increase the first stroke of my footlock.  Stand up, and grab with hands as I inhale deeply.  Pausing for a second at the beginning of the next stroke, I settle my mind clear and ready.  Exhale again while lifting my knees.  Simple.  Efficient, repeated time and again, I mindlessly follow my breath and with exhilaration I begin to climb.

Wind.  September.  Owase. 

Mid climb I suddenly push my mind out from my body, reaching my senses toward the crashing Pacific ocean and the aromatic oils released from Owase’s Hinoki Cypress all around me.   I continue climbing as the crown of this ancient Camphor tree bends and recoils from the southerly approach of the typhoon, as it has for centuries, and as it will continue to do as my grand children’s grand children grow into adults.  The oncoming typhoon intensifies the air pressure over a vast distance.  The small space around my body is electrified with anticipation.  After nearly thirty meters of vertical climbing exhaustion fills my arms and chest but I am now in the trees crown, touching the huge twisted branches with my feet and hands as I begin to calibrate the new situation. Close up I notice the size and complexity of the crown and want to record it somehow, with a photograph or drawing.  I go through a check list,  signs of weakness in the area where I will tie my climbing rope, mapping the movement of my rope toward the area that I will climb to, planning the route there and back. 

Form and beauty soak my eyes as the excitement and tactility of being so high up on this veteran wooden monster wash through me.  

The soles of my feet register the form of the branch as I begin pivoting toward the ball, dropping my centre and pushing force into the rope.  Push and drop.  

On the branch below now as I move toward the tips and building feeling from the ever increasing pendulum of my climbing rope, I feel it tug at my hips and thighs.

I keep balance by sitting down low, with little pushes on my toes and outstretched arms, delicate.

I am aware of my back in particular, feeling my spine as it flexes and twists, the movement of my shoulder blades.  Unlike the tree, I won’t be here for long, disappearing into the fourth dimension of time and back to my terrestrial life.  I transfer my mass into the rope and as I travel on the circle of the pendulum it lightens me and allows my seventy kilos to reach the outermost branches. The newest growth on this centuries old tree is thin and weak but the rope sends my weight back to the stronger part of the tree, and so these branches do not break, only bend a little, as I put my hands out to touch them.

The forest canopy moves like an ocean as I swim through it on my rope, walking a fine line of adrenaline and calmness.  So profound is my love for it that I need no words to express it, unrequited, bizarre and necessary.

Smoke.  November.  Hatfield Forest, UK. 

Climbing out of the tree, packing our gear and throwing it into the back of a Land Rover, we scrutinize our map, looking for former pollard trees that were left to re-wild after the industrial revolution took away their use.  These strange shaped trees have been collapsing and a long report was written on how best to look after them.  Some work plans span fifty years on these Sweet Chestnut, Hornbeam, Field Maple, Hawthorn and Oak trees.  We use strange techniques, some experimental but all trying to follow the natural growing process and reactions of specific species.

Tracking the sun we open up the canopy on surrounding trees to allow Hawthorns more in need of light access to it.  We rip out branches to help start water flow on Hornbeams, the aim is to slowly reduce weight and invigorate growth lower down on the wooden scaffolds. Using axes we chop half way through the cambium to let branches sit on the floor, in the hope that they will root and become stronger.  Nature didn’t expect these trees to turn out the way they have, it is mans use of and then negligence that created towering branches sitting on top of weak shells of trunk wood.  The Hornbeams literally collapse under their own weight, shocking the system and killing the tree.  

Arborists span the divide between trees and humans

We collect dried twigs and light a small camp stove on the bonnet of the Land Rover to boil water for our tea break.  Cows and sheep graze in these old royal hunting grounds.  The wetness of the air mixed with the fire smoke suddenly pulls me into a time warp.  Something deep in me speaks,  perhaps a chain of DNA was awoken, a voice not quite mine from millennia before. And for a moment I can sense a grander track of time. Quite unlike being human.  It stretches backwards and forwards and in the blink of an eye I am gone.

Photographs by Takubo Koko, text and drawings by Paul Poynter