TREES

I woke this morning to the dry sound of wind rustling through bamboo in the garden; a tiny bell hung beneath the eaves was tinkling quietly. I got up and got out, urged eastward by the breeze and a memory, following them to the backstreets that trace the base of the mountains, twisting with each fold in the landscape. The sounds and scents of the city—a dull whine of traffic, fish grilling—grew fainter as I walked, and the clamor of the avenues turned quietly into an old neighborhood. High above, summer clouds moved in a slow procession east toward the hills and over to Lake Biwa, gliding smoothly as if on plate glass, their shadows chasing after them across the landscape.

Following the clouds, I neared the foothills where the streets narrow sharply, bordered on both sides by stone walls. Although the walls are low, at most no higher than my knee, each is topped by a neatly clipped hedge, a wooden fence, or an occasional earthen wall softened by time, completing an enclosure of green and sepia that shelters the lanes, making them worlds unto themselves. Behind the walls and hedges are garden trees and tiled roofs of old wooden houses, and behind them, occasionally, a glimpse to the nearby mountains where the leaves flicker green and white, nuzzled by passing breezes. The sun was warm and the sheltered lane a pleasant place to be. Something in the air and light reminded me of the first time I came to that lane and discovered what I have come back to find today.

There was a warm breeze that day too, nudging and guiding, suggesting left or right with subtle gusts. There was a breeze and there was a cat, thin and black, that appeared suddenly from below a wooden fence, pushing its way out through a row of dense azaleas. It froze, sniffed the air, then prowled down the alley in front of me, a jet-black splash following tightly along the base of brown walls, shadow within shadow, lithe and furtive. It seemed to lead; I seemed to follow, and we walked that way for some time before parting in front of an old wooden gate overhung by a large pine tree. I lingered to look—and the cat was gone.

The gate was inset in a long earthen wall, about as tall as I am, which had weathered and been repaired so many times it had become a mosaic, barklike, a quilt of clay and time. Trees from the garden hung over the wall in places, neatly pruned yet grown beyond containment: the pine by the gate and further down along the wall a maple, a cherry, and a large osmanthus, the petalless orange flowers of which would scent the air in autumn. The cherry was old and leaned out over the lane. Its gnarled black trunk was bent in such a way that it cut through the wall, or rather, the wall had been constructed so as to avoid the trunk, gracefully circumventing it, allowing room in which the cherry could grow. The curved gap between wall and tree, half filled with dappled shadows, seemed to hold a message, like an oracle bone glinting from deep within a cave.

I ran my hand along the bark of the cherry, patting it to feel its density; touched lightly the opening in the clay wall where it skirted the tree. There was language in the very shape of its curve, in the separation yet unity of tree and wall, an intention given form, expressive though silent. The owner of the garden had a choice: cut the tree, or notch the wall. It would have been easier for the builder to remove the tree, yet they chose instead to defer to it—because of its age, because of the generous blossoms with which it painted the lane each spring, because it gave them a pleasure that outweighed the convenience of construction. Because in some way, however small, to them the tree was sacred.

There are many sacred trees in Japan. Some are to be found in forests, others within shrine precincts; all are envisioned as links between the world of the gods and the earthly realm. Most shrines have a cluster of such trees that are allowed to grow wild, or almost wild. In larger shrines, those clusters can amount to small forests while in lesser shrines they may be relegated to only a handful of lanky trees and shrubs, squeezed into the narrow space between shrine building and the surrounding wall, taking up precious space but always, always, allowed their presence, as if the shrines could not exist without them. And so they couldn’t.

In the south of Kyoto, in a place altogether unlike this quiet lane, is a shrine with an immense sacred tree. The road there is wide, rumbling with heavy traffic that settles a gritty dust on everything. Thirty years ago the neighborhood around the shrine experienced a small economic boom; the city government nodded in its direction just long enough to install a metal arcade along the street to shade the front of the shops, hanging it with orange plastic lights, like sad white flowers blossoming from within split pumpkins. But the city’s interest was passing, and time has not been kind. The arcade is streaked with rust and sags in places, the stores are less busy than they used to be, and the neighborhood now embodies the hardness and desolation particular to cities.

The shrine faces the road, separated from it by a low fence of chiseled granite. A short flight of stone stairs leads up from the sidewalk to the shrine grounds, at the top of which, just to the left, is the tree, girdled with the thick straw rope that marks it as sacred. A camphor, its glossy leaves give off an aromatic, mothball scent when crushed. When I first saw the tree some years ago, I had been cycling, lost in thought, eyes to the pavement. Rounding an easy bend, I looked up by chance and stopped still at the sight. Within the context of its environs, the camphor was simply unbelievable, alien yet resplendent. Impossibly large, it towered over shrine and street, shading generously in all directions. It is the kind of tree that humbles those who come before it, making them feel small within the world. Yet it was not just its size that set it apart from what surrounded it; there was also some quality inherent to the tree that was lacking elsewhere. A monument of wild nature, it had become engulfed within a tide of shabby, boxlike buildings and stood among them sublime in its incongruity, mooring the neighborhood to its past, to an ancient, long-forgotten forest soul.

Just inside the entrance to the shrine, sheltered beneath a low roof, was a stone trough overflowing with clear spring water that flowed into it from the mouth of a bronze dragon. Wooden ladles were arranged on the edge of the trough for visitors to use. I took a cupful to rinse my mouth, another for my hands, a last cupful for the cup, cleansing the vessel of cleansing. Ladle laid to rest, I went to the tree, to where the braided roots buckled upward around the base of the trunk.

The bark was deeply grooved in patches, and from the rope tied around its girth hung two strips of white paper folded into zigzags like lightning. Two lines of ants marched on the trunk: one going up, the other down. The ants nest amid the roots of the tree; their food is in the leafy crown, and so each day they march up and down the bark the way sap flows inside. The up-line made a detour around the empty nymphal case of a cicada larvae that still clung to the bark with its sharp claws, a dry ghost. I plucked it off and looked closely at the perfect mask, a detailed, hollow casting. The back of the shell was split open; the cicada had metamorphosed and gone. What crawled out of the soil and this far up the trunk had completed its journey to the top of the tree on a clatter of wings.

Cicadas swarmed in the crown of the tree, emitting a slow whirring that rose and fell in cycles. Inadvertently, birds that had come to hunt them brought other life; a tuft of grass seeded in that way grew out from the crotch of a branch. Just above it, a movement in a limb-hollow hinted at a hidden nest. I thought at first it might be a musasabi, a flying squirrel, but saw it was just a bird’s nest. In the evening, I imagined crows would gather in the tree on their way to the hills. They’d caw and circle, descending on the crown like pilgrims to the shrine, filling its branches with black noise. Such a tree is more than just a tree; it is a community, an ecosystem unto itself. Of course, dependent on the tree are the ants and cicadas and boisterous crows, but the associations are far more complex, amplifying where the tree attenuates—in its leaves and roots.

Despite the thinness of a leaf, packed within it are thousands of chloroplasts, waferlike platelets of chlorophyll. The chloroplasts absorb sunlight, using that electromagnetic energy to create chemical energy, transforming water and carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbohydrates. The oxygen is released while the carbohydrates remain within the plant as energy for its growth.

The system is fascinating for several reasons, the first having to do with the surprisingly important role of chlorophyll in the larger scheme of things.

Although we can extract energy from many sources—tidal, geothermal, nuclear—the source we make the most regular use of is the sun. Some solar energy is derived from wind and ocean currents (which are initiated by solar heat), but most of it comes from plants. The energy we derive from our food, for instance, whether vegetable or animal, began initially as sunlight captured by chlorophyll in plants. Likewise, the energy provided by the fuels we use, whether logs, coal, oil, or gas, was initially electromagnetic energy converted to chemical energy within a leaf. Leaves are where sunlight is forged into a usable form, a process without which it would be just so many photons bouncing around the planet, brilliant but unusable, and Earth no more than a hot rock. Individually microscopic, yet global in extent, chlorophyll molecules mark the boundary where electromagnetic radiation from the sun synergizes with organic life.

Another fascinating thing about chlorophyll is that it appears to not be inherent to plants; originally it existed as a separate entity and was incorporated into primordial botanical life in a symbiotic relationship, like algae and fungus in lichen. Like mitochondria, chloroplasts have their own DNA encoding that is separate from that of their host’s. Whereas the “greenness” of a leaf seems an essential part of a tree, it is in fact a guest within a community.

The ants returning from the crown of the tree each carry a morsel in their mandibles gleaned from the higher reaches. They swirl down and around, descending into their hole. Underground, they burrow among the camphor’s complex root system, tunneling through vast underground networks of soil fungi called mycelium. At points the mycelium fuses with root hairs to form mycorrhizae, “tree-roots,” which are mutually beneficial to both tree and fungi. Through its connection to the widespread fungal network, the tree gets a vastly increased root surface area to absorb water and nutrients; in return, the fungi get energy-rich sugars and amino acids from the tree that they (having no chlorophyll) cannot produce themselves.

An experiment with soil fungi was run recently employing piles of oil-soaked soil. Some were inoculated with fungi spores; the rest were treated in various other ways. All were covered with sheets and allowed to incubate. To the surprise of the researchers, when the sheets were removed those piles inoculated with spores were sprouting mushrooms and the soil was free of oil; nor, tests later showed, did the fungus contain polycarbons. The fungal growth didn’t absorb the oil, it consumed it, carbon chain by carbon chain.

I imagine the camphor tree’s roots stretching wide beneath it, linked in turn to a massive fungal net permeating the soil beneath the shrine, beneath the sidewalk and the road, beneath the city. Whatever percolates into the soil from urban deposits—asphalt and tar laid on the road, oil and gasoline dripped from countless cars, effluent from local businesses—is consumed by the fungi, and at the center of it, towering over it all, the camphor, feeding the web that cleanses the earth. At one end of this scheme, the sun, a fusion explosion pumping out electromagnetic energy; at the other, the earth, a mute mineral globe. Between the two rise the trees, leaves rich with chlorophyll, roots deep in fungi, and through their complex community (part biotic, part chemical), sun and earth fuse.

The people in ancient times, who first girdled the trunk of the camphor with a thick rope and made prayers before the tree, knew nothing of chloroplasts and mycorrhizae. The microscopic intricacies of the extensive biochemical ecosystem, of which the tree itself is only a small part, were unknown to them, and yet they had an intrinsic understanding of trees as life-giving and as being integral with larger worlds—natural and sacred—an understanding that led them to call trees like the camphor in the shrine yorishiro, Vessels of the God Spirit. Amorphous, complex, and mysterious, the Spirit was seen as permeating all nature, flowing through all things, binding them in a unity. We analyze and quantify—count chlorophyll bundles, measure inconceivable miles of fungal strands—yet the tree remains a mystery. It transforms sunlight and we build our world . . . it harbors the God Spirit and we nurture our souls.

I left the shrine with the intent of circling the block to try and see the camphor from other angles but found instead another tree, a strangely formed plane tree, its white and gray-green bark mottled in a patchwork like the old clay wall. It had been planted too close to the street and, as it grew, its bark began to touch the tubular steel guardrails that separate sidewalk from street. Over the years the bark had swelled and enveloped the tubes, enfolding them inside the tree itself, so at that one point, iron fence and tree fused—metallurgy and botany, civilization and nature, melded there into a single thought.

Left to their own devices, in a hundred years or so, all the plane trees along the street might eventually do the same thing; so that in time, segments along the entire metal barricade would be consumed . . . then the street . . . then the city. Seeds would settle in cracks, roothairs pierce the smallest fissures and expand, shoots swell and flush, until everything was blanketed by trees, like the halls of Angkor Wat, asphalt shattered and returning to soil, weathered concrete cool and mossy beneath a huge extended forest canopy—the wild rebounding.

Turning a corner, I headed down a narrow alley that led behind the shrine. Higher buildings by the street gave way to lower wooden residences, all built in the postwar push to develop the area. Each house had a concrete-block wall along its front, weathered and pitted, some leaning, all streaked darkly by black rain. A small brook that used to flow through the area now trickled along in a deep concrete culvert on the side of the alley; some cigarette packets and magazines lay sodden, plastered to the bottom. Until just thirty years ago, all this land was rice fields and meadows; the shrine stood in that open landscape among them. And there among the hardened fields, I found yet another tree, an old hemlock that also had a rope wrapped around it to mark it as sacred, though the rope was very thin and simply made. The hemlock grew out of an implausibly small triangle of land, a remnant patch of soil squeezed between a culvert, concrete wall, and rusty fence, tilting out over the alley, looking surprisingly healthy for the conditions it grew under.

Closing my eyes I saw the city expand from its medieval core at the center of the valley, spread outward like a surge tide rising over a beachhead that it submerges until none but the tips of lonely rocks show through. The city covered the meadow that once quilted the slope in greens and browns; erased small thickets and groves of low trees that bordered the meadows; sucked rambling brooks down into concrete culverts; covered over rice paddies one by one as their owners sold off their land to feed the city’s hunger. The expansion nudged in toward the hemlock, getting closer by degrees, consuming every last scrap of land, until it reached to the very roots of the tree . . . and then it stopped.

Across the city, scattered here and there within the carpet of buildings, patches of green still showed through the development, each one an ancient tree, a yorishiro, towering above the shops and houses surrounding it like rocks above the tide. If you were to walk through the city and seek them out, you would find beneath each tree a shrine. I opened my eyes and the hemlock shone out, sparkling like after a summer shower.

Cities expand. Why not? . . . so does the universe. It is thought, however, that if the average density of matter in the universe is high enough, it will also eventually collapse—Big Bang to Big Crunch. The theory used to be that the universe will, in time, fall in upon itself, becoming increasingly, and inconceivably, small, dense, and hot, collapsing down to the size of a galaxy, of a planet, a grain of sand, and so on, to infinity . . . until there is nothing. Then came the development of String theory, a branch of physics that sheds light on the elusive link between special relativity (the world of the very small) and general relativity (that of the very big).

According to the mathematics of String theory, as things shrink to very small sizes, very strange things happen. As lengths dwindle lower than the Planck length, just a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter, the mathematics of things getting smaller becomes identical to that of things getting larger. The universe does not, according to String theory, shrink to a point infinitely small but only to the Planck length from which it rebounds, and reexpands . . . a cosmic heartbeat.

We push back the wild to build our cities, elbowing aside things sacred in search of convenience. We push and push and push until it seems that we’ll scrape the planet clean and yet, even in Kyoto, a city in one of the planet’s most densely populated countries, sacred trees remain. Caught between concrete walls, crowded in by construction, growing in but the barest patches of soil . . . yet they remain. This is not the vengeance of nature, like plane trees consuming the city whole, nor is it a protective aura, a magic spell that prevents sacred trees from being felled (at times they are). What saves them is not within them at all; it is within us. We shunt and cast aside nature like a universe collapsing, and cast ourselves down with it until we reach a certain point, a kind of Planck length of the soul, beyond which we can go no further, and there we stop. We bear down on the shrine with its majestic camphor, cut and clear the forest that once surrounded it; we build right up to the roots of the hemlock, reduce it to a lonely anachronism by a hard road, but, in the end, we leave those trees. We must. They are sacred to us. We collapse in against ourselves to the point where we meet our limit—at the hemlock by the brook-in-culvert, at the camphor filled with whirring cicadas—and there we pause, and from that most intensely compressed point, we rebound and find our sacred world again.

There is another sacred tree I know well, a cedar tree deep in the woods at the top of a mountain in northern Kyoto. The thing about it that takes me back each year to visit is that it is dead.

The mountain itself is sacred, interspersed from top to bottom with shrines and temples of various sizes, some new, others as old as the forest itself. At several points along the climb to the summit, ancient cedar trees border the path, hung with thick straw ropes. They guard the sanctity of the mountain, yet more than that religious symbolism, what impresses me most each time I see them is simply their primal vitality. The obvious physical strength of the trees itself is reassuring; the massive woody columns seem an embodiment of the force of life itself.

In contrast to those vital trees, at the top of the mountain, just by the side of the path, is the stump of a cedar that fell in a typhoon some years ago. What remains of the tree is still taller than I, but the bark has lost its hue and has begun to moss over in places. Despite the fact that it is no longer living, it still is honored with a straw rope—renewed each year—and in front of it stands a small shrine at which offerings of sake, salt, and rice are made. The tree did not lose its distinction as sacred because it died; it is still honored and will be until what remains has completely rotted away and dissolved back into the earth.

In fact, it will continue to be honored beyond even then. Just at the foot of the tree a cedar seedling pokes out from the roots of the old tree, nourishing itself on the fallen tree. Most likely the sapling was planted by one of the priests who care for the mountain, a way to link old to new. The idea of honoring a life beyond life is not uncommon for people to apply to people whom they have loved or respected. What brings me back to this tree is that I am astonished, and pleased, that the same reverence would be extended to a tree.

In the quiet lane, amid the sheltering hedges and fences, I come again to the cherry pushing through the earth wall. It casts a long shadow across the pitted clay surface onto the street. Finding a spot to sit just across the lane from the tree, I begin to sketch: a fern poking out from the stone foundation of the wall, the rhythmic play of light and shadow on the tiles that form its cap, a shoot with three green leaves sprouting from the side of the gnarled trunk, new life sprung from old. I record each detail as faithfully as possible, imprinting them as much in my thoughts as with graphite on paper, yet as I begin to draw the crown of the tree, I find myself simplifying; capturing each leaf is a task I’m not up to.

Drawing, I remember a meeting with architects who were designing a large structure in Osaka; a computer-generated video image of the proposed building was being screened for the owner. The room was dark; a deep, pulsating techno-thrum reverberated seductively from the monitor. The camera appeared to zoom in on the building, floated weightlessly into and through the structure, sheets of glass exuding light, lingering on the details of the architecture: the grillwork on each step of the escalators; a glittering mid-air sculpture; anodized steel rods stabilizing a curtain wall, each flange depicted perfectly. The camera backed out through the glass into the courtyard to admire the exterior again . . . and then it happened. The trees in the courtyard came into view, but unlike the architecture, which was portrayed with precise photorealism, the trees looked like paper cutouts, each leaf a simple quadrangle, as if they were made of confetti sprinkled on a sticky wire frame. Whereas the computer could generate an image of a multistory architectural structure in excellent and subtle detail, and sail through it effortlessly, were it to try to portray that level of detail on a single tree (let alone a courtyard-full) the calculations would freeze the CPU. Trees are simply that complex.

The black cat has come back to the alley and rolls about playfully. It sniffs at the air, circles a few times, then jumps, slipping gracefully through the gap between cherry and wall, a shadow returning to its source, through the hole and gone. I finish my sketch and go over to the wall, peek through the gap to see where it went. Although I cannot see the whole garden, what I can see appears like a scroll painting: a waterfall spills out of the darkness of trees, a stream meanders and disappears behind large bushes at the foot of a large black pine, stones along its banks punctuate and modulate the flow. The plants in the garden are mainly evergreen: pine, azalea, camellia, and osmanthus. The overall form of the garden—created by stones, soil, and those evergreen plants—remains basically unchanged throughout the year. The plants that do mark the change of the seasons with color or scent do so in measured quantities, and when they pass, the body of the garden still remains.

But this was not always so; a thousand years ago, perennial flowers and grasses—the ephemeral plants—were extensively used in Kyoto’s gardens. Not that the entire garden was given over to them, but they were prominently placed, especially in the senzai, the “forward garden,” that part built near the residence. Senzai had many forms (in fact the word referred to several things) but one ancient scroll shows the senzai as a collection of favorite plants, one specimen of each, planted in a small plot by a veranda: a tall grass that would hue bronze in autumn, a plum with scattered evanescent blooms (and three insect cocoons attached), and five or six perennial flowers. The plants were selected for their individual characteristics, not because they fit together to make a well-balanced, artistic arrangement. What’s more, each plant individually expressed a mood: autumnal melancholy, evanescence of spring, and so on, and was chosen for the emotion it symbolized; a poetic understanding.

Some weeks ago, I stood in the middle of town at the intersection of Oike and Muromachi streets, a place that represents the antithesis of that understanding. Oike is a broad east-west avenue, one of Kyoto’s largest; west of Muromachi it is lined with large, fifty-year-old zelkova trees that, like the grand elms of America and Europe, are tall and vase-shaped and arch over the street, turning it into a tunnel of filtered green light. They grant the street, though very wide, a comfortable scale and a tempered microclimate: the temperature a few degrees cooler, the wind less cutting, some air pollution filtered, a modicum of extra oxygen provided.

To the east of Muromachi, however, Oike is devoid of trees, the large zelkovas that once graced its sides having been stripped off in the process of building an underground parking garage. The garage was built as part of a project code-named “Symbol Road,” because the mayor hoped the new street would become a symbol of “modern” Kyoto. His dream was to rival Paris’s Champs Élysées, an affection for Western (rather than Asian) models surpassed only by his attempt to build a replica of a Parisian bridge, Pont des Arts, over the Kamo River in an attempt to boost tourism to Kyoto. The Symbol Road project resulted in Oike Street being denuded and widened. Actually “widened” is incorrect. The street is now six meters less wide than the old street, but the dividers that once held the grand trees were removed, unifying the road into a single, massive swathe that feels wider. The intent was to increase the road’s efficiency, but the effective result is an eight-lane sea of asphalt, a “Symbol Road” indeed, but not of the sleek “City of the Future” that its proponents hoped for; rather, it is a symbol of our dependency on automobiles and, more sadly, the ease with which we eliminate nature when it conflicts with other urban needs.

A bus rolled by, sunlight flashing off its windows, shimmering. I walked into the shade of the remaining trees and looked back at the barren street to the east, dreaming it anew, bordered by ranks of old trees. The trees, as I saw them, no longer had the evenly balanced shape of youth, but they had not been removed or replaced; in fact, to the contrary, the oldest among them had been hung with thick straw ropes, and in the shadows at their roots small dishes of salt and rice had been left as offerings. But this was no country shrine—city life continued around them. The street bustled beneath their shade, the sidewalks filled with people attending their business: going to meetings, shopping, talking on cell phones. A group of men and women were sitting about on boulders that had been placed on the street as benches, having an impromptu meeting, each nestling their own air-linked Think-Pad. When the group got up to leave, one among them walked over to a particularly old tree nearby whose form was now wizened and bent. The sidewalk curved away from its base to accommodate its thick roots. The woman clapped her hands together and made a short silent prayer before turning and running to catch her group. In my mind’s eye, Oike Street was not a French-style boulevard (though those are beautiful in their own right) but rather resembled streets seen in old sepia photos of Japan lined with irregularly spaced, asymmetric old pines—irrational, organic, and divinely poetic—a street that, perhaps, a visitor from France might admire for its natural harmonies and thoughtfully mull as a model for his own city.

Perhaps we need to be foolish, to ruin what we have in order to know its true worth. Perhaps we don’t, and we’re simply foolish to no end. Whichever, as we fumble our way through, we are not without landmarks or guidance. Beguiled by breezes, by movements in shadows, we are led to where the message lies in wait—at an ancient tree enfolded live within a hardened city, at a gnarled trunk slipping gracefully through a wall. I stand now by the old cherry, come here to know this place again, to reread its oracle and remember. Given neither entirely to the wild nor entirely to subjugation of that wilderness, the two together—nature and architecture—harmoniously intertwine, and elucidate the mystery. . . how to build, how to be.