Tristan Gooley’s How to Read a Tree, clues and patterns from roots to leaves, Hodder Press, 2024.
I cannot think of another example of my completely changing my mind about a book about a third of the way through, although I am never going to like the cover very much. Dare I say it grew on me, which feels as though it should have a “no pun intended” on it? Apologies to Mr Gooley for my original thoughts. At one point I was thinking, is this written for adults or children? And where are the actual answers to the riddles he poses? Then, suddenly, I was on his wavelength. The personal anecdotes (he is clearly a devoted family man) are actually very charming and sweet and I began to understand that there are of course, as is generally the case in nature, exceptions to every rule. The conclusions he draws from the trees he sees are far from straightforward, it’s a complicated matter. But I do look at trees differently now, realising that every one has a story to tell. There is a lot to digest and I found it useful to pause and absorb before moving on. How much of it will stick I don’t know – what I would really love is a day out in the field with the author – but the book is so well organised and indexed that it is easy to go back to it and find what’s needed. I have given up on at least one of the author’s books before – I will definitely be going back to it now. Tristan Gooley is a or even the ‘natural navigator’ (the title of one of his books) and his work is not just about trees. He can read clouds, the sun, the stars and even puddles. And more. He is also the only living person to have both flown and sailed single-handedly across the Atlantic.
In many of the examples given, I found myself thinking, “Oh yes, I hadn’t thought of that but actually it’s really obvious,” that tree growth is essentially all about seeking light for instance – but then it turns out it is very far from as simple as that. Many other factors, such as prevailing wind direction (south-westerly in our case), are critical too. It becomes impossible not to share the author’s enthusiasm and joy when he too realises a truth about trees for the first time. Epiphanies.
Photos in this post have no particular relationship to the text, apart from the nettles, they are just trees within my sight as I write.
There are so many gems. Leonardo da Vinci commented in A Treatise on Painting: “All of the branches of a tree at every stage of its height when put together are equal in thickness to the trunk [below them]”. The design for the Eddystone Lighthouse was based on the shape of the trunk of an oak. The coinage of the phrase “smile path”, a curved path which goes around an obstacle. A friend mentioned to me recently that he loved how the natural path in my garden is curved and asked how I had achieved it. The answer was that it had simply evolved that way. The desire path, on the other hand, is a short-cut and by following them over the roots of a tree we damage them over time causing the failure or death of parts of a tree on that side. Roots do not go as deep as we might suppose but as a general rule they spread to around two and a half times the width of the canopy. Branches grow on a trunk either opposite each other or alternately, whilst trunks are not circles, they are “skinny into the wind”.
A tree’s answer to most problems is to grow more wood. Where there is stress of weight as a branch grows out from a trunk, there is reinforcement, a bulge either above or below the base of the branch. The thickest and longest roots tend to be on the windward side and so can serve as a natural compass. But also they will point towards the edge of a forest where the winds are strongest (I am still struggling to get my head around this). There is no point growing more leaves if they overshadow the ones below so there are changes in angles and stalk lengths to compensate, an avoidance of doubling up as can easily be seen viewing a plant from above, such as these nettles.
The ‘tick effect’ can be seen in both branches and leaves: branches on the southern side where there is more light will be closer to horizontal, with leaves it is the other way around. Branches grow towards the light but leaves need to be perpendicular to it in order to harvest it.
Trees do not have a single age: the youngest parts are furthest from the trunk and the base. The leaves of olive trees, for example, are silvery the better to reflect sunlight in their hotter environments, leaves on the ground will collect around the trunk in “wind shadows”. Thorns and spines, such as those on holly, provide a safe haven for small animals and birds who reciprocate by feeding on the fruit and spreading the seeds.
Different species have leaves with varying degrees of flexibility. Poplars are especially mobile in this respect, the aspen in particular, to the extent that the author imagines people on a nature writing course being locked into a room with Roget’s Thesaurus until they have found alternatives to the quaking, trembling or fluttering aspen. Steel girders are not round, they would be unnecessarily heavy for their strength and so are H, I, L, T or U-shaped, and the same can be true of leaf stalks.
‘London’ plane trees are renowned for their ability to deal with high levels of pollution and they shed their bark plates more on the southern side (reason uncertain) – another natural navigation aid. “Have you ever glued two things together and soon afterwards felt the dried glue on your hand crinkling, crackling and peeling off as you move your fingers?” we are asked. “I find it weirdly satisfying.” So do I, without ever having thought about it. My brother and I used to drive our father mad with our dipping of fingers into melted candle wax at mealtimes. Similarly, bark will tell us of unusual movement or stress in a tree’s history. Trees self-prune (and self-heal), branches are shed for good reason, leaving behind “eyes”, of which there will be more on the southern side (more branches in the first place).
Fungi can be part of a healthy symbiosis if they fruit from the ground amongst the roots but if they are growing from bark that means the tree is in trouble – under attack or even dead.
How many seasons are there? There is a good case for saying that there are six: Bare, Bud, Burst, Flower, Fruit, Fall. There are 72 micro-seasons according to a Japanese tradition.
Trees can count. They do so by judging the length of night and day and temperature. Artificial light can scramble the clock, so that a tree, or one side of it, stays in leaf for too long and exposes the leaves to frost damage.
These are all merely summaries and simplifications – you absolutely need to read the book if the subject interests you. I had often heard about mast years but never understood what they were. Now I do. Mast years are when trees produce many more seeds than usual. Weather is a factor but it is mostly to do with animal populations which are themselves, in a way, so regulated.
A French arboricultural scholar, Pierre Raimbault, posited in 1995 that trees have ten stages of life – no branches, secondary branches, lower branches self-pruned and so on.
Some plants, like the horse-chestnut, produce flowers which change colour once pollinated. And flowers want to reflect light to attract insects and so will be commoner on the southern side. They will orientate themselves over the course of a day in order to follow the movement of the sun.
As an aside, coming across it in this book, I recently had to correct an earlier post in which I had used the word “umbrel” instead of “umbel”. Shaped like an upside-down umbrella surely, I had thought. Having looked into the etymology it was a forgivable mistake. The diminutive Latin word is “umbella”, which changed to “umbrella” in Late Latin under the influence of the root word umbra, meaning shade.
Tristan Gooley celebrates the virtues of sitting down in nature: we cannot see as far but we see differently and we will see more.
Trees are not “cuddly green giants”, the selfish gene does not rest, and some are more ruthless selfish than others, but they are “emperors of time”. Before the epilogue, index, acknowledgements and a tree family identification guide, the author concludes with this, a signpost actually to a richer life in which boredom disappears: knowing and understanding these things means we will see them, the habit will grow and we will stop by trees and “let the world wait”. Don’t set out to arrive on time, walking to meet friends at a country pub say, he said earlier on, set out with plenty of time to spare. Eventually whilst tree-reading we may “feel an urge to stop a stranger … and gently shake them from their busyness with the words, “Do you not see?“
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