Talking (With) Trees: Arboreal Articulation and Poetics

ABSTRACT

Drawing on recent developments in critical plant studies, this essay attempts to develop an ethological poetics of trees. I start by analysing four examples of recent fiction, poetry and non-fiction that are each about different kinds of trees – The Overstory by Richard Powers; Translations from Bark Beetle by Jody Gladding; Tree Talks by Wendy Burk; The Biggest Estate on Earth by Bill Gammage – with relation to JC Ryan’s phytocritical model. In addition to their representation of botanical lives, I also consider how Powers and Gammage understand trees as constitutive of Indigenous kinship networks. Then, I combine the insights gleaned from the textual analysis with work by Michael Marder and others in order to outline key features of tree ontology and articulation, and I conclude by positing a provisional arboreal poetics.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical plant studies
• phytocriticism
• ethological poetics
• trees

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For discussion of a similarly complex, multimodal communicative system in ants, see Cooke (2020).

2. I am using the term ‘speculative ethology’ after Matthew Chrulew, who convened a series of symposia on the topic at Curtin University, Perth, between 2016 and 2019. Speculative ethology denotes a richer, more imaginative understanding of more-than-human lives than traditional ethology.

3. My argument here runs somewhat counter to Ursula Heise’s seminal Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. In Heise’s terms, The Overstory may be a very successful attempt ‘to shift the core’ of the environmental imagination ‘from a sense of place to a less territorial and more systemic sense of planet’ (2008, 56).

4. For a more extensive reading of this book with relation to animal and insect poetics, see Keller (2017, 162–8).

5. Pascoe cites the importance of Gammage’s research in the Acknowledgements section of Dark Emu, p. 9.

6. Neidje’s point corresponds with contemporary biology, which recognises that plants and animals share many of the same genes. EYA genes, for example, are present in both plants and animals, though they are used differently by different species.

7. My principal interlocutor for these final paragraphs was a Poinciana (Delonix regia) in orange-red blossom, located by the banks of the Brisbane River at the end of Merthyr Road in New Farm, on Juggerah country. Despite the valuable assistance of the Poinciana, my comments in this section are not meant to refer to a particular tree. While I appreciate phytocriticism’s emphasis on individual plants and share Ryan’s related concern regarding ‘the marginalization of individual botanical lives’ (2020, 98), I am also wary of how this emphasis might intersect with neoliberal constructions of individuality, and what it might therefore ignore about tree collectives and communal subjectivities, and their places in multispecies kinship networks. Even to talk about a generalised, individual tree as I do here may be a problematic atomisation of tree being: ‘individual’ trees may be more commonly interconnected through their root systems, so that the forests they compose, as I mentioned earlier, ‘are superorganisms with interconnections much like ant colonies’ (Wohlleben 2016, 3, 14–8). In trees’ superorganismic collectivity, entwined by multimodal, chemically mediated forms of communication, it might be most useful to think of forest rather than tree expression.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stuart Cooke

Stuart Cooke is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literary Studies at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. His books include the poetry collections Lyre (2019), Opera (2016) and Edge Music (2012), and a monograph, Speaking the Earth’s Languages: a theory for Australian-Chilean postcolonial poetics (2013).