There is a mature bald cypress standing on the edge of Sydney Creek that I’ve passed many times. I don’t know its age. Such trees often live to 600 years. This one will likely die much sooner as the ocean rises and saltwater reaches its roots.

Bald cypress tree on Sydney Creek, North Carolina.

Salt, drawn through the roots, doesn’t allow osmosis to properly function. The salt solution is so dense it wicks water out of the tree’s tissues, killing it by dehydration. And if not killed by dehydration, too much salt interferes with the chemical processes that distribute nutrients throughout the tree and convert chemicals into sugars.

There are ghost forests along the edge of Pamlico Sound where stands of cypress and pine have been poisoned by intruding seawater. Like Neolithic stones, they are the memory of dead trees still standing. Their fate will likely visit the trees of Sydney Creek in my lifetime.

There’s always the danger that I’ll project my own sense of self upon the other, that I’ll see myself mirrored in the presence of the other. Science thinks that a sin. Maybe it’s a strength, instead.

Plant Intelligence

The idea of plants possessing intelligence—a different kind of intelligence—is gaining credibility. When attacked, trees have been documented communicating their distress by electrical pulses transmitted through their roots and across fungi networks. By the same means, trees have been known to feed other stricken trees and nurture saplings. In a German forest there is a stump from a tree felled 300 or 400 years earlier that is still alive, still showing green wood, fed by the roots of surrounding trees. It may be this act of altruism serves the purpose of thwarting competitors that might try to usurp the stump’s space but individual trees nearing their death have been known to bequeath a substantial amount of the carbon sequestered in their roots to other trees in their community. How to explain that?

How do we define the intelligence of another species when we’re not even sure of our own? Some biologists religiously restrict intelligence to animals, but Stepfano Manusco of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology has a simpler definition. “Intelligence is the ability to solve problems.” By that definition, both plants and animals are intelligent.

What Manusco is looking for in plants is “a distributed sort of intelligence, as we see in the swarming of birds.”

In The Hidden Life of Trees biologist Peter Wohllbern wrote “Tree roots have sensitive brain-like structures that can distinguish whether other roots it encounters are one of its own roots, the roots of another species, or its own species.”

What are the possibilities of seeing and thinking without eyes or brain? What sense of self might be distributed across a network of roots and fungi? And how is time perceived by an individual whose life spans centuries?

The Oldest Tree

The average life of a bald cypress may reach 600 years but there are individual trees in North Carolina whose life is measured in millennia. One tree in the Three Sisters Swamp of the Black River is 2,624 years old, probably older. That tree was alive when Nebuchadnezzar sacked Solomon’s Temple and the Jews first dreamed of a messiah during their Babylonian captivity.

Bald cypress trees root deep in the water of Sydney Creek, North Carolina.

There is an even older tree on the opposite coast, a Great Basin bristlecone pine that has lived for 5,066 years. That tree was alive near the beginning of the Bronze Age when the standing stones of Newgrange were first raised.

Quantum mechanics has taught us that time is a biological construct, not an object separate from ourselves. Time and consciousness are inseparably entangled. What must time and consciousness seem to creatures whose years pass like our hours and centuries like years?

If trees are conscious, they must feel pain. Pain is adaptive. It indicates danger. Without it, a conscious being wouldn’t survive. But if a tree feels pain, if it isn’t simply a green machine, it presents us with a moral dilemma we are poorly prepared to answer.

Monica Gagliano, an evolutionary biologist who studies plant cognition, said something that lingers with me. “For me, a plant isn’t an object, it’s always a subject that is interacting with other subjects in the environment.” From object to subject is a profound step.

“The main realization for me wasn’t the fact that plants themselves must be something more than we give them credit for, but what if everything around us is much more than we give it credit for, whether it’s animal, plant, bacteria, whatever…”

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