This is a transcript of a Subtitle podcast episode
Nina Porzucki: When I was little, I was fascinated by this 1980’s cartoon, Rose Petal Place.
Patrick Cox: This is Nina Porzucki.
Nina Porzucki: It took place in a garden and the narrator was a tree.
Clip from Rose Petal Place: “I am Elmer, the ancient elm tree. I’ve stood right here behind the old house.”
Nina Porzucki: I loved, loved, loved, the idea that the tree could talk.
Clip from Rose Petal Place: “You could say my roots are here. My arms reach to touch the sun. I spread my shade for everyone. I sing my song my whole life long.”
Nina Porzucki: The whole premise of Rose Petal Place, which I rediscovered on YouTube recently, was that a little girl is moving away from her garden and she’s really sad about it. So sad that she sobs over her flowers and then magically her tears make the garden come alive.
Clip from Rose Petal Place: “Her flowers began to walk and talk, laughing and playing in the sun. And now they’ve become my family and the happiest most beautiful of all is Rose Petal.”
Nina Porzucki: Patrick, I cannot tell you the amount of time I spent manufacturing tears to try and talk with the flowers and the olive tree in my backyard growing up. Of course, there was nothing original about this fantasy. We humans have long fantasized about talking plants and trees.
Clip from The Wizard of Oz: “Oh apples! Oh look, what do you think you’re doing? Did you say something? How would you like to have someone come along and pick something off of you? I keep forgetting we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
Patrick Cox: Nope, not in Kansas anymore.
From Quiet Juice and the Linguistic Society of America, this is Subtitle, a podcast about languages and the people who speak them. I’m Patrick Cox.
This week, languages and the trees that speak them. OK, trees don’t have larynxes or tongues. But they do interact with their surroundings, in all kinds of hidden ways.
Patrick Cox: Nina! I’m so glad you’re back.
Nina Porzucki: Patrick! Yes, for one episode.
Patrick Cox: For those who don’t know, Nina used to host The World in Words with me.
Nina Porzucki: Which was also a language podcast. So dear listener, I also need to say I know trees can’t talk. Despite the ardent wishes of my five-year-old self.
Patrick Cox: What does grown-up Nina say?
Nina Porzucki: Grown up Nina has always wondered, do they communicate?
Lynne Boddy: You walk through a peaceful woodland and think, goodness me. Look at all these wonderful trees and little do you know about what’s going on under your feet and there’s so much activity going on and on, but you just could not imagine.
Nina Porzucki: Underground. Lynne Boddy is a fungal ecologist at Cardiff University in Wales. And all that activity under your feet are tree roots and a whole lot of fungus. And Lynne, she loves fungus.
Lynne Boddy: Most people think of fungi, they think, Oh yuck! If you mention fungi, you know, they rot our homes and our food, they’re nothing but a nuisance. But that is so far from the truth. They do do those things, but without them, this planet — the ecosystems of this planet — would not work.
Nina Porzucki: In fact, without fungi, many trees in the forests wouldn’t survive. And Lynne — you can hear it in her voice — she’s outraged that we’re not taught this.
Lynne Boddy: So when we’re at school, we’re told that it’s the root hairs on roots that soak up the water and the nutrients. But in the real world, in natural ecosystems, the vast majority of plants get their nutrition from the soil via fungi.
Nina Porzucki: See? Without fungi, trees would live isolated, barren lives. And it’s a symbiotic relationship. The fungi help trees soak up the water and nutrients that they need to survive. And the trees gives the fungi the sugars that they’ve created through photosynthesis. And this particular kind of fungus, it has a name. It’s called michorizae.
Lynne Boddy : With the michoriza — in the USA you pluralize it to michorizae, with an ‘e’. But that seems a very wrong thing to do is put a Latin ending onto a Greek word. And I’m sure, I’m sure the Romans probably would have done it, but I think that nowadays we usually anglicize things to pluralize them, not Latinize these Greek words. I would anglicize the word to michorizas, whereas — anyway, I just thought, I say that since this is a program about language.
Patrick Cox: She’d have a thing or two to say about Octopii.
Nina Porzucki: Or octopuses
Patrick Cox: Okay, so I get that trees and fungi live together and help each other. But does that help them talk, or whatever we’re going to call it?
Nina Porzucki: Well turns out this kind of fungus not only helps an individual tree survive but it is also key to how trees interact with each other. And, I’ll tell you more about that in a bit. But first, Patrtick, let’s take a walk. I want you to meet someone.
Patrick Cox: Ohh, I always like meeting your friends.
Nina Porzucki: You’ll like this one. Just wait.
Nina Porzucki: We’re talking a walk around my neighborhood, Patrick
Patrick Cox: A walk around your neighborhood. Why?
Nina Porzucki: Lovely Cambridge.
Patrick Cox: OK.
Nina Porzucki: Because I want to take you to visit a friend of mine.
Patrick Cox: A special friend?
Nina Porzucki: A special friend. Here we are!
Patrick Cox: What is your friend?
Nina Porzucki: She’s a dogwood tree.
Patrick Cox: Hello tree. It’s got a hammock on it so it’s somebody else’s friend too.
Nina Porzucki: Yeah, it’s got a hammock and a rope swing and some lights, and it’s in the front yard of an apartment building.
Patrick Cox: I was going to point that out Nina. It doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to somebody else.
Nina Porzucki: Yeah it doesn’t belong to me but I feel particularly drawn to this tree and I watch it every year. The dogwood blossoms face up, and they look like little plates. They make such a beautiful silhouette because they look sort of like little, thin lins, or plates. They’re just really dainty and lovely and I just really love this tree.
Patrick Cox: It feels to me that the people are communing with the tree. I don’t know if they’re speaking to it but like you say, there’s the hammock and the rope and the lights, so the humans are all over the tree. But is the tree all over the humans?
Nina Porzucki: Um, the question of the moment. I don’t know. I don’t know if the tree is giving back — is all over the humans. But the tree gives them shade, so it does give back. It is in “conversation” with humans, in a way. It might be more human-focused than actually how the tree reacts to the world or communicates with the world.
Patrick Cox: And the tree — because it’s kind of on its own — it’s not part of a forest or anything. There are a couple of mini trees, sort of not too far from it, but it doesn’t look like it’s a candidate for one that communicates with other trees.
Nina Porzucki: I don’t know that Patrick. I don’t know that we know. I mean, we’d have to dig down into the Earth. Remember that fungus? There’s tiny mini-trees and shrubs and all sorts of things in the yard. There are tree across the street. I don’t know who it’s communicating with, besides the humans that it’s living besides.
David George Haskell: We don’t want to anthropomorphize. Trees are not little people.
Nina: Patrick, this is naturalist and writer David George Haskell, and he’s thought a lot about our relationship with trees.
David George Haskell: We have to honor the otherness of soils and trees. I mean as humans we think of language in a particular way. We think of emotion and thought and memory in particular ways. We need new words to describe what is the memory held in the soil.
Patrick Cox: New words. That’s interesting. I mean, we’ve been giggling a bit about this whole idea of “talking trees,” right? Because it’s awkward. Maybe it’s because there aren’t adequate words for this form of natural world communication. “Talking” clearly seems off. It it implies consciousness — and presumably no one’s suggesting that?
Nina Porzucki: Well….are trees sentient beings? Do they think? Feel? Remember? Should we count nonhuman communication as language? Maybe this is the wrong way to think about it.
David George Haskell: If our only approach is to sit in a seminar room and to listen to other very clever human beings talk about these issues, I think we’re going to come up with an answer that humans are very special and that we’re the only ones who have it. If on the other hand, we open our ears to the diverse ways that communication happens out in the rest of the living world we might come up with it with a less human-centered onset to the nature of language.
Patrick Cox: So, we’ll project less if we just stop thinking like humans? And we’ll start understanding the true nature of how trees communicate? Is that it?
Nina Porzucki: Well maybe if we stop putting humans at the center of everything, and looking at the world in different space, maybe? I don’t know but perhaps our lack of words for this — trees talking, whatever they’re doing —mirrors our lack of understanding of everything that’s going on underground. What exactly is happening down there?
Patrick Cox: Underground. You said that again.
Nina Porzucki: Perhaps it’s the key to how trees talk.
David George Haskell: One simple answer is indeed trees do talk but they talk in the language that we find very hard to listen to. Most of that talk is not acoustic. It’s chemical.
Patrick Cox: That just gives me a headache, to hear the word, “chemical.” What does he mean by chemical?
Nina Porzucki: Well, remember those fungi that Lynne Boddy described living alongside the roots of a tree in the forest? That help the tree with water and nutrients and that symbiotic relationship? Scientists have discovered that these same fungi aren’t merely delivering nutrients and water to one tree, but a fungus is often interacting with many trees in a given area — so effectively connecting one tree with his or her neighbor tree.
Lynne Boddy: So the fungus links up tree A with his neighbor tree B
Nina Porzucki: And his or her neighbor tree and his or her neighbor tree.
Lynne Boddy: And that could even be different species of trees.
Patrick Cox: It’s a network!
Nina Porzucki: Exactly. In a dense forest, one fungus could be connecting a whole stand of trees together. And this network — it’s sort of like a biological internet beneath our feet. And Patrick, it even has a terrible nickname: the Wood Wide Web. Say that five times fast.
Patrick Cox: No I don’t think so. I might manage one. Wood Wide Web. OK.
Nina Porzucki: Good job.
Patrick Cox: OK, so an invisible network: that sounds all futuristic and internetty. It also sounds kind of a little quasi-religious, like there’s this hand of something we can’t see that’s guiding things.
Nina Porzucki: Yeah, totally. Which, weirdly, bring us back to fiction and fantasy.
Clip from Avatar: “Those trees were sacred to the Oma Tkai in a way you can’t imagine.”
Nina Porzucki: Remember this movie Avatar? That James Cameron film from 2009?
Patrick Cox: Oh yeah, the alien blue people-type-people.
Nina Porzucki: Yeah, the Navi.
Patrick Cox: They worshipped trees, right?
Clip from Avatar: “What we think we know is there is some kind of electro-chemical communication between the roots of the trees, like the synapses between neurons.”
Nina Porzucki: There’s a reason this film was interpreted as a fable about our own Earthly stewardship of forests.
Clip from Avatar: “It’s more connections than the human brain. Get it? It’s a network.”
Nina Porzucki: OK, So I want to be clear: the actual Wood Wide Web isn’t one vast network connecting all the trees around the globe. That’s fanciful Hollywood thinking there. But think more of a patchwork quilt in the forest, where one stand of trees is connected by a single fungus and then another stand of trees yards away is connected by a different fungus. And within a single network, as Lynne Boddy mentioned earlier, many different types of trees might be connected by that same fungus. Like a birch and a fir tree could be connected. And Patrick, here is what blew my mind. In that network, the trees take care of each other, delivering water, nutrients, sugars, carbon — whatever they need.
Patrick Cox: Wait, are you saying that like a fir tree will help a birch that’s thirsty by sending water through the fungus?
Nina Porzucki: In a simplistic sense, yes. So, here’s an example — it comes from a German ecologist named Peter Wohlleben in his book The Hidden Life of Trees, which is a great book and I recommend everybody read it. He manages a forest in Germany and he writes about a stump in this forest there that had been cut down years ago. It has no leaves, it’d been sheared down to a nub. But Wohlleben discovered that the stump was still alive. In fact, the trees surrounding the stump were feeding the poor thing, delivering the sugars they’d produced, keeping the stump going and alive long after humans had knocked it down and used its trunk for wood.
Lynne Boddy: So, water moves, nutrients move, sugars move. And it turns out that recently it’s been discovered that other things move too. And that includes chemical messages.
Patrick Cox: Ah, back to the chemical messages. I still don’t really know what they are.
Nina Porzucki: So chemical messages, it turns out, could be warnings! If a tree is getting attacked by an aphid, say, it will send chemical messages around its own body to ward off the attack. And scientists have found that these messages can also be transmitted to neighboring trees warning them of the same threat. Scientists have also discovered that some trees use the fungal network to take care of their own offspring — delivering water or nutrients or whatever is needed for the survival of their seedlings. And in fact, seedlings themselves have no trouble joining the fungal network.
Lynne Boddy: That tree seedling, the roots of it, will almost instantly tap into this network that’s already there.
Patrick Cox: Aw, that’s so cute.
Nina Porzucki: But don’t fear, it’s not all peace and love. Just like the human internet has its dark side, the wood wide web isn’t all light. Scientists have found that certain trees like the black walnut will actually use the network to send growth-inhibiting chemicals — bad stuff — to their neighbors to ensure their own dominance in the region. So, trees can help their stumpy brethren, or they can use their networks to kill off competitors.
Patrick Cox: So, what about our houseplants? Unfortunately, that’s sort of like the greatest connection that many of us have to plants. I mean, our place has tons of them all hanging out kind of next door to each other, together.
Nina Porzucki: But they’re in pots, right?
Patrick Cox: Yeah
Nina Porzucki: Which makes it a pretty quiet scene at the Cox household. Cut off from the possibilities of digging into that fungal network, chemical communication isn’t happening underground for your poor houseplants. But there might be other ways plants are communicating through the air, but underground in the Cox household, it’s pretty silent. In fact, that same German ecologist Peter Wohlleben, he also described the silence of modern agriculture in his book. In well controlled, treated soil, where all the fungus has been stripped away, rows of corn or grain or other plants are sort of standing side by side in rows in silence, not plugged into a fungal network. It makes me sort of sad.
Patrick Cox: And there I was thinking how poetic that silence is, you know of fields of wheat blowing in the wind. Maybe a little too human-centric, I’m being here.
Nina Porzucki: Perhaps
Patrick Cox: OK so how does this silence underground — what’s the long-term impact on the livelihood of plants and trees?
Nina Porzucki: There are so many unknowns about the Wood Wide Web, about the silent underground, about the parts of it that are still chattering away.
Lynne Boddy: We know that there are some interesting things going on but we have just scratched the surface.
Nina Porzucki: So, the next time you pass by your favorite dogwood tree, or fir tree, or whatever tree is your favorite, or you take a walk in the woods, look down, take a moment to consider what’s happening beneath your feet.
<CLIP: I am Groot.>
Nina Porzucki: And maybe, in conclusion, you’ll hear something.
Clip from Guardians of the Galaxy: “I am Groot. I am Groot.”
Patrick Cox: I have no idea what that is.
Nina Porzucki: Did you not see the big blockbuster hit “Guardians of the Galaxy,” Patrick?
Patrick Cox: Oh. I hang my head in shame.
Clip from Guardians of the Galaxy: “I am Groot.”
Patrick Cox: Thanks Nina!
Nina Porzucki: You’re welcome.
Patrick Cox: Nina Porzucki is person not a tree.
Nina Porzucki: Who talks.
This episode of Subtitle was reported by Nina Porzucki. The podcast version of the story is available here and on Apple podcasts.
Subtitle’s sound designer is Tina Tobey. Editing help by Jennifer Goren. Thanks to our partners at the Linguistic Society of America and the Hub & Spoke audio collective.
Subtitle is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.