A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse
and a branch shall come out of his roots.
Isaiah 11:1
When you are pruning trees as severely as you must when you coppice or pollard, it is reassuring to think, as Neville Fay asserts, that “trees have a tendency towards immortality.” The Hebrew prophet Isaiah wrote clearly about this idea, using the language of sprouts. Establishing the unbroken line that must lead to the birth of the Abrahamic Messiah, Isaiah wrote, “A green shoot will sprout from Jesse’s stump, from his roots a budding branch.” He did not seem to be sure whether the Messiah was to be a stump sprout or a root sprout, but whichever it might be, he was going to be a sprout of the same tree. It was phoenix regeneration, just what Job had longed for (see page 25). A tree doesn’t necessarily die. It can improvise a new life from the old one.
Trees are functionally immortal. Even the dumbest conifer can find a way to begin anew, however hard its life. A sawara cypress on Long Island started life as a single-stem beauty in a robber baron’s garden, but as it grew old and as the garden was neglected, its lowest branches hung down until the tips hit the ground. There each tip set roots, and a whole ring of new Chamaecyparis arose on the circumference of its mother. Again, the branches hung down and rooted, and another ring arose. And once again. A tree that was once 75 feet tall with a crown 70 feet in diameter is now, about a century later, 60 feet tall and 360 feet in diameter. It embraces four generations of itself. Is it an individual or a colony?
Creosote now covers much of the open plains of the American Southwest and northern Mexico, where it is an invasive pest (although a native) in range and pasture. Its spreading stems arch over, touch the ground, and root there. In this way, one plant can eventually cover acres of ground. The botanist Frank Vasek radiocarbon-dated the oldest dead stems at the center of a very large ring of creosote. He then measured the radius of the ring and calculated an average rate of growth. Finding an even larger circle so wide and old that the center plants were no longer even there, he used his average growth rate to calculate roughly the age of this immense clone. The figure was 9400 years.
Disease knocked down the American chestnut beginning in 1904, but that did not destroy it. From the roots of the dead giants sprung sprouts that grew up again. Before they reached fruiting age, the disease killed the new stems, but not before they had themselves made basal sprouts, which in their turn sprang up again. A century later, all over its former range, you can still find chestnuts, but the onetime giant has metamorphosed into a serial shrub. In theory, it could remain so forever.
Clonal groves that spread by root sprouts are likely the champions of tree longevity, although no one has yet found a way to reliably estimate their age. They send up new sprouts again and again from the same spreading underground rootstock. Four Australian botanists studied a clonal grove of the shrub Lomatia tasmanica that spread in the creek bottoms of a temperate rain forest in southern Tasmania. The plants are triploid, and so sterile. They flower but do not fruit. Genetic analysis of plants taken from three separate patches there showed no genetic diversity at all. They were identical not only with their current peers but with fossil plants known to be more than 40 millennia old. The living plants are clones of the fossils: the plant is at least 43,600 years old.
There are even grander claims for Pando—which means “I spread”—in southern Utah. It is a clonal grove of quaking aspen that covers almost one hundred acres on a mountainside in Fishlake National Forest. There are 47,000 stems in the grove. Most, though not all, come from the same root. Estimates of the age of this tremendous organism range from 10,000 to 1 million years. The age is not so important, unless you take the Guinness Book of World Records point of view about life: biggest, oldest, fastest, best. (Botanists gloat that Pando is now clearly the heaviest organism on Earth.) The point is rather the one raised by Darwin. After he observed a colony of sea pens—colonial organisms each of whose rising fingers had its own mouth, body, and tentacles, but all of which moved as one and reproduced as one—he wrote, “Well may one be allowed to ask, ‘What is an individual?’ ”
The facts of sprouting wonderfully complicate the thought. Surely each clone is an individual, but also each one is part of a community. It is a little like the quantum in the superposition experiment: you shoot the thing at a gate, and rather than choose one or the other path, the same thing goes both ways at once. Life in this sense is a kind of shimmering, where you see the uniqueness of an organism at one moment and its ramified countlessness on the other. In the starlight of this thought, you begin to glimpse another view of ever more.
Immortality and individuality don’t mix. The Christian or for that matter the Buddhist assertion about eternal life become less credible the more you think that immortality is a property of individuals. In the old days, Roman Catholicism opposed cremation, since the idea was that you had to keep the body intact waiting for resurrection. No one who thought this must ever have explored the facts of decomposition or the fauna of the grave, or for that matter the fact that part of what digests our bodies when we die is what helped us digest others when we lived.
Even while we live, we are hardly isolate individuals. Ninety percent of our cells are not the human genome, but others, chiefly bacteria. More than one hundred species of these organisms inhabit our guts, and they help us to parse the countless creatures from the world out there whom we eat and whose cells go to sustain us. Our immune systems are built through our intimate relationships to others—sometimes parasitic, sometimes symbiotic, sometimes just commensal—within the supposed castles of our bodies. We are continually pumping out of these bodies what from one point of view is refuse, but from another is life to the world around us. Our own genome is a composite of others.
The Christians’ Gospel of John is clear on this point. A person is only really alive, wrote John, if he or she is a branch attached to the growing vine. God may prune the branch to make it bear more fruit, but as long as it is attached to the parent vine, it will prosper. If it is severed, it withers and is thrown into the fire. Like the reiterating growth on a tree’s trunk and branches, the vine branch is both an individual and a member of community.
A green shoot shall spring from the shoot of Jesse, wrote Isaiah. “Abide in me,” wrote John, conveying the assertion of Jesus that he was the vine through whom the branches lived. The tree and the vine both teach about the shimmering: it is not true that there are no individuals, and it is not true that there are. When a branch is pruned, it sprouts back. Even when a tree appears dead, it may arise again from the roots. And it can apparently do so for ever more. It is the same and not the same. It is the shimmering. This is what the sprouts teach: immortality is not a matter of holding on, but of letting go.