For each workshop we have been setting ourselves a series of  readings, some focused on the participatory method we will be working with, and others on the particular research partner. To date, one of the papers that has really transformed my view of the world was Anthony Trewavas' paper Green Plants as Intelligent Organisms. His short, fascinating argument proposes that if intelligent behaviour is understood in terms of a capacity for problem solving, then showing that plants do indeed solve problems must lead us to conclude that plants should be classified as intelligent organisms.

Addressing the obvious problem that plants don't have any kind of centralized control tissue or brain-like equivalent, Trewavas utilises an analogy with social insects which have come to be understood more widely as intelligent at the level of the hive (e.g. hive mind). In much the same way he argues that for plants "intelligent behaviour arises as a property of the whole integrated cell and tissue system" (414).  Outlining the variety of methods plants use to sense the environment and to communicate between their different parts, he argues that plants' use of complex signals enable them to behave as an integrated organism.

These integrated systems allow plants to solve a wide variety of problems in context-specific ways. These include adjusting to fluctuations in resources (whether seasonally e.g. rain, or spatially e.g. variations in soil type), being eaten or disturbed, encountering obstacles (e.g. boulders, or cliffs), competition from other plants, finding unexploited resources, and how to optimally place roots, shoots and leaves so that they can take advantage of the resources that are available (414). Importantly, plants don't make decisions about these issues in the moment, but make predictions about future conditions in order to attain optimal fitness (415). For example Trewavas uses the example of the Mayapple which "makes commitment decisions as to branching or flowering years ahead" (415). He also notes that plants are able to predict future shade patterns (via reflected far-red/red light) and change their shape in response before light is actually lost (415).

But are these organisms intelligent or merely 'pre-programmed'? Couldn't it be the case that plants are only following simple inbuilt rules rather than engaging in problem solving behaviour? Trewavas' answer to this is that the range of environmental factors that a plant responds to is so high that the flexibility required is too great for the organism to be pre-programmed. Adding together potential abiotic factors (e.g. soil acidity, light, radiation, temperature, water, atmospheric gases, and soil) and  biotic factors (e.g. predation, disease, trampling and disturbance), together with the ability to recognise different strengths of these factors leads Trewavas to claim that "the number of possible environments in which a temperate plant might grow is to the order of 10^8" (416). This number is so high that "only intelligent, flexible responses can provide the individual with the ability to master this complexity of environment and maximize sibling number" (416). 

With all this in mind, I spent the day prior to our workshop walking through the Forest of Dean looking for evidence of intelligence - here's what I found:

In 2002 Owain Jones  (with Paul Cloke)  published the book Tree Cultures and since then has kept up a series of conversations with academics,  artists and professionals about ‘aboriculture’. Recently, Owain has been in conversation with the poet Frances Presley who became aware of his work on trees through the book. Frances writes poetry and prose on landscape, language, nature and history. Her current Arts Council funded project involves engaging with individual trees in particular landscape settings. In late October, Owain and Frances spent a day visiting trees sites in Bristol and also met with the botanist Libby Houston who is an expert on the rare whitebeam trees that grow in Avon Gorge Bristol. Below is an extract of their conversation and some pictures of the day…

24 October 2013, Arnos Vale cemetery, Bristol.

FP: I am very conscious of the difference between urban space and somewhere like Exmoor, especially the context and extent of it.  As an artist you could take a close up of a leaf or a tree and it could be anywhere, but it isn’t.  As a writer in London I am conscious all the time of the thinness of it…

OJ: Thinness?

FP:  The thinness of the experience in terms of the tree and where it is situated – the fragility of nature before you get back into the urban.  It is a completely different experience to having that almost infinite reach you get in wild landscapes.  I think trees behave in different ways in the city – as well as people.

OJ:  How definable is that?

FP:  I think it happens in the work.  Using language you draw in more aspects of the landscape and the people who live there, the whole area.

OJ: Some aspects of that must be unconscious.

FP:  Yes, there is a richness and density of experience on the moor which makes itself felt in the writing.

OJ:  Which is the opposite to thinness I suppose.

FP:  But the thinness is also interesting, almost more interesting at times.  There are violent juxtapositions, such as the trees and the graffiti on the Parkland Walk in London – a disused railway line.  Trees are stressed in the city, even sometimes graffitied, as if they were another brick wall.

OJ:  Can you say – when you encounter a tree somewhere like Exmoor – how that feeds into the work?  Is it hard to say?

FP:  Right now it is!

OJ: Is it a process you don’t articulate?

FP: Well – it is in the writing – in the text.  Saying that is a way for me to avoid discussing it in another kind of discourse, such as this one.  That’s part laziness and partly a sense that an explanation could be become turgid and superfluous.  The poem itself is a manifesto.

OJ: Is the text reworked or does it stay as it emerged?

FP:  Both, but usually it is reworked.  Sometimes it just does not work at all – the text has another kind of thinness – it is too slight.  The notes towards a poem have to have a movement and substance of their own.  Something has to be emerging, rather like the tree.  Perhaps even travelling, like a migrating birch.

There is one poem I’ve had a lot of difficulty with, but I’ve still kept it, can’t quite get rid of it, even though it hasn’t quite worked.  It has to do with an isolated oak tree known as Hoar Oak on Exmoor, up on the top, near the Chains, beyond Simonsbath, right up on the top.  And it is this fragile thing.  It barely survives.  But it is ‘significant’ and it has a fence around it.  It’s a struggle to get there.  You have to wade across a river and miles of bog.  This poor thing is barely on the verge of existence.  It reminded me of the crazy people I heard about, the Breatharians, who try to live on air (obviously a sect that has not survived long).  It is like that, this tree just trying to live on the atmosphere.  It has virtually nothing else in terms of nutrients.  And the poem is a very slim, slight poem that has got thinner and slighter, but I am reluctant to let go because it represents something.  It represents the least you can have to grow as an oak.  It is as fragile as it could be.  Like the urban trees it is growing under stress and in the wrong place.

OJ:  Have you a sense of how old it is?

FP:  It’s not that old, because the original Hoar Oak was destroyed.  It was replaced in the 1900s because it is a significant site, an ancient oak that has to be replaced, but the conditions are no longer tenable.  It’s still there, but only just.

OJ: Like the poem

FP:  Yes!

Later FP read a passage from Roger Miles The Trees and Woods of Exmoor (Exmoor Press, 1972) to OJ  on the Hoar Oak:

For work by Frances Presley see:

• Myne: new and selected poems and prose, 1976 - 2005  Exeter: Shearsman, 2006
• www.shearsman.com
• Lines of sight  Exeter: Shearsman, 2009 
• Stone settings, with Tilla Brading, Minehead: Odyssey Books, 2010
• An Alphabet for Alina, with Peterjon Skelt, Hereford: Five Seasons, 2012  www.fiveseasonspress.com 
• The Ground Aslant: an anthology of radical landscape poetry, edited by Harriet Tarlo, Exeter: Shearsman, 2011
• “Common pink metaphor: from ‘The Landscape Room’ to Somerset Letters”, in How2, 2008
• Collaborative sequence with American poet Julia Cohen: www.likestarlings.com. 
• British Electronic Poetry: http://www.soton.ac.uk/~bepc/;
• Archive of the Now: www.archiveofthenow.org.uk;
• Poetry International:  http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net.

Part of the City of Trees project by UK artist Jyll Bradley reflecting upon "Canberra’s 100 years through an exploration of the city’s remarkable tree-scapes". This includes 7 audio pieces, (linked to a map of the city)  By Jyll Bradley with Jonquil Panting (BBC Radio Producer). Music by Michael Sollis, performed by The Griffyn Ensemble

http://www.canberra100.com.au/programs/city-of-trees/

Prologue:

Act 1: 
We sit in a circle in the forest, each upon a tree’s trunk. David is demonstrating – patiently – how to create a spoon from a block of wood. Imagine the shape of the spoon, he tells me. It’s within your block of wood. I marvel at the spoon shapes others manage to make, their commitment, persistence, focus, capacity. I can’t see the spoon for the tree. It’s a cherry tree. It’s a small log. It’s a spoon, though not in my hands. I have hands like logs.

Act 2:
I wander off into the forest. I worry about getting lost. I find myself staying close to the path we walked earlier, as a group. I find myself back at the tree I stopped at then. I force myself to move on, to move off, to find another tree, a different perspective. I lie on my back, looking up in to the tree’s canopy, stretching hundreds of metres above me. I close my eyes. I listen. Bird song up high, buzzing bees near my ears, airplane traffic, a chainsaw some kilometres distant, the patter of rain drops like a drum above me, the soft rustle of leaves in the wind. Talking leaves.

Act 3:
We are back in our circle, on the tree logs. We are reflecting on our experiences of the past two days. It is loud. We are loud. We are talking over each other, not listening, not listening properly, not taking time to listen, not hearing. Conversation – dialogue – dialogic – reciprocity – exchange. How can we humans converse with trees when we struggle to converse with other humans? I worry that the shift-pull to the more-than-human is symptomatic of the failure of – or an exhaustion with the challenge of – the human-to-human. Less talking, more listening – ways to listen, to hear, to resonate.

I am touching sound, being touched by sound.

I am a resonating chamber. My body is attuned.

I tremble.

Behold. Behear.

Sounds travel. They move. They carry. And they spill over the edge, escaping the circumference, breaking the horizon.

[horizon: Origin: 1540–50; < L horizōn < Gk horízōn (kýklos) bounding (circle), equiv. to horíz(ein) to bound, limit. The horizon is a border, a boundary, the dividing (or meeting) line between sky and earth.] *

Epilogue:

* From Deirdre Heddon, ‘The Horizon of Sound: Soliciting the Earwitness’, Performance Research, 15 (3). pp. 36-42

Driving to the workshop one ‘enters the forest’. This is a not uniformly treed space,  but it is clear, and one knows (in my case from past experience and knowledge), that trees play a major role in the ongoing performance - or process - that is this place/landscape/legislative entity. The trees clearly have agency, operating in temporal ecologies that gear in complex ways with human time in terms of cycles, durations, tempos.

Our workshop is located in two centres which rely on the nature of the forest to attract business of one kind or another – the trees as economic and aesthetic agents. We hear from Wye Valley AONB staff about how that agency is involved in a number of endeavours in which, again, the trees and the spaces they make, are players.

But all that – so far – is more or less is pretty standard social construction of trees forests type stuff,  with a general attention to the trees as agents folded into it.

What about the trees themselves. Trees as individual agents – trees as participants in the creation of knowledge?

Well – in the bodging (a technical term) of the spoons we began to engage with the ‘flesh’ or body of a particular (youngish) cherry tree which have been felled to produce workable timber. To me this exercise began to open up the precise nature of tree anatomy in terms of grain, growth rings etc. We begin to know the tree through its flesh. Of course we are no experts – (although some very nice spoons were produced) but our tutor was. And this speaks to the whole history and geography of wood craft and technology where specific types of trees and their timber and the characteristics they possess,  have formed into precise formations of nature-culture.

So – what is in it for the trees? Well, all organisms need a niche in ecological terms, their dwelt,  but in the anthropocene, niches can be as much economic and cultural as they are ‘of nature’. Landscape conservations conventions,  such as those of the EU,  are now paying attention not only to ecological biodiversity but also cultural and ecological  diversity and how the these can  intersect into  wider flourishing of eco-social diversity . Craft and wood technologies/economies are vital for tree biodiversity and in term the survival and flourishing of tree species.

After the bodging, we did a series of exercises which involved being with(in) the trees. Listening, looking, touching, playing with  - trying to get a sense of the everyday practices, day to day lives,  of individuated trees, trying to get a sense of the space as performed by them (e.g.) looking at the canopy in mirrors, filming the canopy in parallax (Owain).  In other words,  we took time to get close to trees, to change our normal ways of engaging with a research other. These aspects of simply ‘getting close to’ and ‘giving time to’ seem important elements of co-production of knowledge with  both humans and non-human. These need to be leavened other inputs  - witnessing, empathy, and ranges of knowledges which can range from craft to science,  to that of other tree space users.

How to make a tree talk, first immerse yourself in the forest, second establish a means of communication... So we spent two days talking to the trees, but did we have a conversation? Consensus was that rather than talking to individual trees we were communicating with the forest, a wider conversation. We touched and talked to the trees, asking questions – ‘what is your name? …my name is sorrow’ the tree wore an expression of woe, years of memory and anguish embedded in its timber and expressed in its growth, in its twisted form and rugged branches. It communicated its place in the world.  We chose it as an intermediary for our dialogue.

Walking through the forest, slowing down, acclimatising to the steady pace of its form, we realised a common experience of light, smell, sound and touch. Perhaps not a conversation in the literal sense but a conversation nevertheless that prompted a response in the form of questions- why was the trunk of the young beech trees wet, but dry with the older trees?  ‘I like these trees they remind me of forests in North America……are there any Australian trees? ‘ -  we were talking!

So onto another part of the conversation, spoon making- now you are talking! - very absorbing, moderately competitive – ‘start with a log, split it, split it again and once again to see the heartwood and the sapwood then go to work with your Swedish axe, knife and gouge’.  Sitting on logs and working on another,  the steady rhythm of carving which, on reflection, synchronised with the rhythm of the forest, led us into a closer conversation initiated by the grain of the timber, the imprint of the tools, the feel of the wood and the mistake which prompted a cry of anguish , sharing  a new skill and more communication, a shared sense of achievement and expression – work with the grain and sing the spoon blues - ‘my spoon aint got no bowl and the handle lacks a crank’ - each spoon had a character, the conversation was evident and there was photographic proof.

So several questions arise – how should we define this conversation and would it have happened if we had not talked to the trees?  We discussed what we had experienced, was it a selfish conversation, one of self- indulgence, or did it allow each of us to converse in our own way?  Perhaps the language of the trees was more dominant than initially thought.

For me, lessons learnt include the expression of the encounter; that the conversation might be subtle and unconventional but it is happening and we need to be aware and open to the fact that it is happening, although not necessarily in a conventional way.  That in sharing a common experience or activity, we establish a new dialogue, a new means of communication derived from the experience, a neutral, persistent, pervasive and all-embracing whisper from the forest in which we were immersed, inviting further enquiry, a common experience but individual conversations without any judgement from the trees that prompted them, a neutral environment available to us all.  What might we need to move more deeply into conversation, what prior knowledge might help?  If we had lingered longer or synchronised our minds in more forest centred activities, would the forest have shouted louder?

 We left our ‘bio balls’ made of clay hanging from a tree to continue the conversation in our absence.

I have never been very good with plants. When people give them to me my heart sinks as I know that I will likely be unable to look after them properly and they will, sooner rather than later, die. Unlike my cats, plants don’t shout at me when they want food, don’t jump on my lap when they want cuddles, don’t block my way when they want attention. They are quietly there, almost in the background of my noisy, rushed daily life and all too often I just forget about them altogether, let alone engaging in conversation with them.

However, the location and activities of this workshop made me consider plants in new ways. In the Forest of Dean, away from the distractions of my daily routines, I experienced plants as physical, living beings and as potential interlocutor. I was struck by the sensuality and tenderness I felt when I stroked some trees’ beautifully tactile skin; suddenly it occurred to me that I was interacting with someone. I also found myself pondering the generosity of the forest that was surrounding me and letting me walk through, and the generosity of individual trees where I spotted plenty of tiny creatures whose life the trees support in many different ways.

I had worked with wood before, but had never had the opportunity to start working from a section of a newly felled tree. [part of the workshop involved carving spoons from green cherry tree logs]. Seeing and manipulating the section in its near integrity, still impregnated with its vital fluids, made me reflect on the fact that the building material we find pre-cut in DIY stores and so often take for granted comes from living beings. Carving was also a new experience for me and gave me a sense of how the structures that support life in the tree dictated how the shape we wanted should be carved out of it. I discovered the pleasure (and pain) of trying to go along with the layers of these structures in my carving, hoping that those structures  would legitimise the shape of  my spoon and the shape of my spoon would celebrate the wood’s structure. I think that was close to having a conversation with a tree, but I was also aware that the tree had to die in order for me to experience that. 

Decorating my clay ball with leaves from the forests’ floor felt like a more dialogic experience. This time I chose to use elements that were already dead so I only picked leaves that I found on the ground. Harvesting all sorts of small leaves to decorate my ball was a joyful experience, which inspired gratitude and wonder for the great variety of plant life that the forest supports. I liked my leafy ball and didn’t necessarily wish to leave it behind hanging from a tree with all the other balls. But such a gesture rightly reminded me that what comes from the forest belongs to the forest and that if we take from the forest materials to build our lives, we ought to give back by offering our labour and creativity to preserve and nurture, and express gratitude to, the forest that makes our lives possible.

The ‘trees’ workshop was an opportunity for me to go to the Forest of Dean, a place just over an hour’s drive from my home, yet somewhere I’d never visited before.  It’s a fascinating place, touristy yet quiet, open yet exclusionary.  Before heading down, I’d read Cristopher Stone’s ‘Should trees have standing’ an essay from the early 1970s about law and the environment.  I’m going to apologise here for dumbing this down and, indeed, any misinterpretations of Stone’s words.  Among some fascinatingly nuanced ideas, my non-legal mind fixed on his argument around giving legal status to abstract entities.  An example of this would be a government or a corporation being an actor in law, with rights that need to be protected.  Stone argues that there’s a case for giving these same rights to environmental assets – landscapes, watersheds and so on.  This wouldn’t be a case of saying that a tree could never be cut down, or that attempts should be made to preserve the landscape in aspic, more that there should be some consideration of the intrinsic value of the landscape in and of itself, rather than just its economic value to a human actor.  If a stream is being polluted, this might have a negative effect on someone’s tourism business located in a picturesque spot downstream, hence the owner of that business might sue the polluter for the economic harm caused to his business.  Stone suggests that there should be some capacity to consider issues beyond the economic rights of humans or corporations in environmental destruction, to consider the right of the landscape to be a landscape, with intrinsic value beyond the economic.

Of course, the intrinsic value of landscape is somewhat abstract.  Stone suggests, however, that we have already given concrete power in law to the abstract value of copyright.  Why should a piece of text or music be given the kinds of protection guaranteed in copyright law? – we as humans have decided that these creative outputs should have agency within law.  Why then can we not give the same agency to the environment?

Clearly a forest can’t come to court and sue a company that’s polluting a river running through it.  So Stone suggested nominating some kind of guardian to speak for the forest, much as a lawyer might go to court to speak for a corporation or a government.  This notion really chimed with me reflecting on our discussions at the bee workshop where we spoke to the human guardians of bees (i.e. bee keepers) to start our ‘conversation’ with bees, to help us understand their issues and think about ways of co-constructing research agendas with them.

Our two days among the trees brought these issues to mind for me.  Are the Forestry Commission / other officially appointed ‘guardians’ of landscape in a position to speak for the trees or do we need some other kind of engagement?  As I lay in the forest with my feet in the bare earth (getting midge bites!), I didn’t find an answer to this, but it was soothing and I emerged from the workshop wondering if the main impact of our conversation with the trees was in grounding/lulling a group of busy academics who otherwise lead hectic, stressful lives...

Our third workshop In Conversation with Trees will take place on the 11th and 12th of September in the Forest of Dean. We'll be working with the Wye Valley Area of Outstanding National Beauty. In this post Richard Coles, who is organising the workshop, shares some of his thinking behind the event.

For the next workshop we move from the animal kingdom to the plant kingdom to have ‘conversations with trees’. We will immerse ourselves for two days and nights in the forest environment in order to seek to understand some of the dimensions and processes that trees express through their unique physiology and expressions of growth. 

Trees feature prominently in the human psyche. Many of us are drawn to them as major symbols of a natural and healthy environment.  Trees span generations and have a permanence which seems to defy the fragility of human existence, forming markers and providing foci of memories and events recorded in history.  Trees have been and still are the most prominent permanent features in the landscape. They form boundary markers and many individual trees are commemorated in names which record their importance, symbolism and associated events – The Tree of Life, The Mitre Oak where the Bishops of Worcester and Wales met, The Sherwood Oak associated with Robin Hood, Adam and Eve (two ancient oaks that once stood in Moreton on Lugg Herefordshire). Our woodlands have the same associations, ‘Flora’s Wood’, for example, planted and named to commemorate the tragic death of a loved daughter. Forests are linked with ideas of freedom, environmentalism, tree hugging, the natural. Our conversations with trees are well developed, deep seated and profound. 

There are many folklore associations between trees and conversations. The wonderful tree, the Black Poplar featured by Constable in his landscape paintings, is said to talk to the traveller as its leaves rustle and chatter in the breeze and to foretell the coming of bad weather - an approaching storm. But the conversation continues in the use of a tree's timber, the structure of the grain, its unique qualities and precise memory locked within its growth. The Ginkgo (an ancient tree far preceding the existence of human life) continues to express its geological pedigree through its unique aesthetic where we attempt to capture its longevity by extracting herbal products in the belief that we can assimilate its apparent ability to defeat time.

To refine our conversations we will be adopting a range of approaches which can be broadly described as ‘performative’ and which draw upon different techniques often derived from an art based intervention approach.  The idea that the landscape performs is well established in landscape circles. While the landscape is often perceived as static, when one moves through it different interactions occur, cued by sensory engagement and creating a dialogue between observer and the environment like a performance. In doing so the dynamic processes are revealed and a conversation initiated. Exactly what these conversations are and what the trees tell us we will find out.

Performative approaches are gaining popularity and credibility as important qualitative technique in the fields of anthropology, cultural studies and similar. They require specific tasking/actions involving shared interactions and experiences highlighted as helping to understand human behaviour, especially regarding aspects that have problematic representation (see Wikipedia's performative turn for a brief overview).

We will use the approach to elicit our conversations with trees, we will linger in the forest, listen to the trees, ‘tune in’ and hold our conversations, examine their memories, work with their very substance of the trees to feel their grain and pattern of growth. We will consider their different languages and expressions of form and function, their aesthetic, we will sensitise ourselves to the qualities, properties and processes of the trees. We will hear from our hosts, the Wye Valley AONB about their work involving the unique qualities of the forest and their own conversations, how they elicited them and the consequences of their actions.