How Trees Show Love
A Photo Story from Trees Telling Stories
Many years ago, my sweetheart and I were so close, that we basically merged our lives together.
While we’re still individuals in many ways, our trunks merged in a process called ‘inosculation’ – from the Latin verb inoscular which means ‘to kiss’. That’s all the Latin I know, so no more questions about that, please.
Other trees though, show love in different ways. Let me show you a few of them.
Sometimes, two trees will just hold ‘trunks’ like the two here:
Other times, while they might be very close, they only get to touch one another when the wind blows favorably.
That’s the situation with Jean (the western juniper on the left) and Pat (the ponderosa pine on the right):
Trees also show love for their offspring. They provide shade and protection from the wind, so the young trees have a chance to grow. And they even share nutrients below ground.
Suzanne Simard, in her book Finding the Mother Tree, writes about how ‘mother trees’ will share carbon with the trees around them via a fungal network – and her experiments show that they share more carbon (basically tree food) with their offspring, than with others in the area.
I know this helped me when I was young.
And with some trees, what looks like caring for their young, might be more of a form of ‘self-love’ - when their young are mostly clones, like these Aspen here.
So, there you have it. Tree love, like all love comes in many forms. And coming back to my sweetheart and our ‘kiss’, yes it started over a hundred years ago and if we’re lucky, we’ll still be kissing hundreds of years from now. That ought to be some sort of record, right?