I spent last Thursday doing a lot of things. One of these things was planting Tulip Poplar trees. A lot of them. If you’ve noticed, I’ve used “a lot” twice already, and we are only three sentences in. That is to say, as a college student on summer break who is majoring in hammocking and reading good books, a day on the farm felt jam-packed in the best possible way.
As we stood planting these trees, I was incredibly aware of how long I was taking with each stage of the process. Shoveling dirt? I would say I averaged about a half shovel full for every shovel Liz, a bona fide farmer, produced. After a while, I realized that the amount of time it would take me to produce two half shovels was actually less than the time it would take me to wrestle a heaping shovel full into the trough we were using as a container. Why was I so aware of taking longer to do this task? I have to think it’s because we live in such a fast-paced world. In school, we are praised for how quickly we can read a book or finish an essay. Constantly juggling multiple class loads, speed and efficiency are key.
From the moment I stepped foot on Nightfall Farm, I realized this was not the case. As we carried buckets of water out to the animals instead of using the generator to fill them, time slowed down. It wasn’t an absentminded process as it could have been if we had carried the empty buckets out and then filled them up, or even if we had driven the buckets out. The weight in my hands served as a reminder that I was there, in that moment, transporting something so integral in the life processes of the chickens and sheep. This wasn’t just a chore, it was the moving of a life force from one end of the land to another.
So, with a sack of trees in front of us, we began to assign them to pots and seal them in with fresh dirt. Their roots sprawled out around them as if there were tiny lightning bolts shooting from them, I placed them in each pot in what must have resembled a jumbled mess. As Liz patiently showed me over and over again how to spread the roots, I kept missing the point. I never even learned how to French braid hair, what credentials did I have to suggest I knew what to do with all of these straggly roots—longing to wind themselves once again in the soft ground. Looking for a place to root to, stuck in the outer space of my hands.
After probably about twenty practice trees, I was left to choose the correct sized pot, arrange the roots, and surround them with soil on my own. Even as a girl who grew up talking to trees, I had the urge to do this quickly and efficiently in the most scientific use of the word. If that day taught me anything (which it did), it’s that there are very contrasting ways to go about being efficient. Surely there were more things that needed to be done, so I couldn’t spend large amounts of time on each tree. A few moments alone with the trees, and I realized this wasn’t like writing a paper or reading a book, this was a process between two living things. I was treating it as a monologue instead of the conversation it should have been.
When talking about one of our main problems with how we approach our agricultural and economic practices today, Wendell Berry says, “the problem simply is that land users are using people, places, and things that cannot be well used without affection [and] to be well used, creatures and places must be used sympathetically.” When I started planting the trees, I did so without affection. It was something absent-minded, simply a process of placing a tree in a pot and coating it in dirt. However, once I was one-on-one with the trees, I began to pay closer attention. I noticed the bumps in their trunks which indicated how far I should cover them with soil. An hour before when Nate had pointed them out, I had nodded in agreeance but spent the next few trees struggling to distinguish this “noticeable difference” from the other area of the trunk. Now, the trees revealed these spots to me. Next was the act of surrounding the roots with soil. As I handled the trees, I started to realize the roots weren’t a jumbled mess, they were layers built upon one another. As I placed a new shovel of soil in for each layer and allowed the roots to lay in the direction they leaned towards, the process felt more genuine and intimate than it had before. It was no longer about planting all of these trees, it was about planting each tree in my hands as an individual and allowing it to be its own process instead of a minor step in a larger process. As Berry would express it, I began to approach the trees with the affection they needed.
It has been a week since I planted those trees, and I’ve been returning to these moments in the days that have followed. Today after a hike, as my dad and I set up our hammocks and stared up at the sky, I recognized the leaves above me as larger versions of the leaves on the trees I had planted a week before. As I stared up at them and the sun shining through, I felt a surge of something resembling pride while realizing that the trees I had spent so much time with the week before had the potential to grow into this. When I was younger, my dad and I would traipse through the woods, and he would reveal the name of each tree in such an easy way that I was convinced they were talking to him. Today as I looked up at the Tulip Poplar trees I just so happened to strap my hammock to, I had this moment of recognition. Maybe I wasn’t so far off when I was little. The trees do speak to us, just like people, when we take the time to get to know them.