Top Quotes: “Braiding Sweetgrass” — Robin Wall Kimmerer

26 min readMay 18, 2021

Introduction

“Our stories say that of all the plants, wiingaashk, or sweetgrass, was the very first to grow on the earth, its fragrance a sweet memory of Skywoman’s hand. Accordingly, it’s honored as one of the four sacred plants of my people. Breathe in its scent and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten. Our elders say that ceremonies are the way we ‘remember to remember,’ and so sweetgrass is a powerful ceremonial plant cherished by many indigenous nations. It’s also used to make beautiful baskets. Both medicine and a relative, its value is both material and spiritual.

There’s such tenderness in braiding the hair of someone you love. Kindness and something more flow between the braider and the braided, the two connected by the cord of the plait. Wiingaashk waves in strands, long and shining like a woman’s freshly washed hair. And so we say it’s the flowing hair of Mother Earth. When we braid sweetgrass, we are braiding the hair of Mother Earth, showing her our loving attention, our care for her beauty and well-being, in gratitude for all she has given us. Children hearing the Skywoman story from birth know in their bones the responsibility that flows between human and earth.”

“In a survey to my students, they were asked to rate their knowledge of positive interactions between people and land. The median response was ‘none.’

I was stunned. How is it possible that in 20 years of education they cannot think of any beneficial relationships between people and the environment? Perhaps the negative examples they see every day — brownfields, factory farms, suburban sprawl — truncated their ability to see some good between humans and earth. As the land becomes impoverished, so too does the scope of their vision. When we talked about this after class, I realized that they could not even imagine what beneficial relations between their species and others might look like. How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like? If we can’t imagine the generosity of geese? These students were not raised on the story of Skywoman.”

“When Skywoman arrived, she didn’t come alone. She was pregnant. Knowing her grandchildren would inherit the world she left behind, she didn’t work for flourishing in her time only. It was through her actions of reciprocity, the give and take with the land, that the original immigrant became indigenous. For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.”

“In the Western tradition there’s a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top — the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation — and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as ‘the younger brothers of Creation.’ We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn — we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They’ve been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out. They live both above and below ground, joining Skyworld to the earth. Plants know how to make food and medicine from light and water, and then they give it away.”

“My ancestors were ‘removed’ three times — Wisconsin to Kansas, points in between, and then to Oklahoma. I wonder if they looked back for a last glimpse of the lakes, glimmering like a mirage. Did they touch the trees in remembrance as they became fewer and fewer, until there was only grass?

So much was scattered and left along that trail. Graves of half the people. Language. Knowledge. Names. My great-grandmother Sha-note, ‘wind blowing through,’ was renamed Charlotte. Names the soldiers or the missionaries couldn’t pronounce weren’t permitted.”

“When they got to Kansas they must have been relieved to find groves of nut trees along the rivers — a type unknown to them, but delicious and plentiful. Without a name for this new food they just called them nuts — pigan — which became pecan in English.”

Nuts and Trees

“Unlike juicy fruits and berries, which invite you to eat them right away before they spoil, nuts protect themselves with a hard, almost stony shell and a green, leathery husk. The tree doesn’t wean for you to eat them right away with juice dripping down your chin. They’re designed to be food for winter, when you need fat and protein, heavy calories to keep you warm. They’re safety for hard times, the embryo of survival. So rich is the reward that the contents are protected in a vault, double locked, a box inside a box. This protects the embryo within and its food supply, but it also virtually guarantees that the nut will be squirreled away someplace safe.

The only way through the shell is a lot of work, and a squirrel would be unwise to sit gnawing it in the open where a hawk would gladly take advantage of its preoccupation. Nuts are designed to be brought inside, to save for later in a chipmunk’s cache, or in the root cellar of an Oklahoma cabin. In the way of all hoards, some will surely be forgotten — and then a tree is born.

For most fruiting to succeed in generating new forests, each tree has to make lots and lots of nuts — so many that it overwhelms the would-be seed predators.”

“Throughout Indian Territory there are records of Indian agents being paid a bounty for rounding up kids to ship to the government boarding schools. Later, in a pretense of choice, the parents had to sign papers to let their children go ‘legally.’ Parents who refused could go to jail. Some may have hoped it would give their children a better future than a dust-bowl farm. Sometimes federal rations — weevilly flour and rancid lard that were supposed to replace the buffalo — would be withheld until the children were signed over. Maybe it was a good pecan year that staved off the agents for one more season. The threat of being sent away would surely make a small boy run home half naked, his pants stuffed with food. Maybe it was a low year for pecans when the Indian agent came again, looking for skinny brown kids who had no prospect of supper — maybe that was the year Grammy signed the papers.”

“The U.S. Constitution apparently had no power to protect the homelands of indigenous people. Removal had made that abundantly clear. But the Constitution did explicitly protect the land rights of citizens who were individual property owners. Perhaps this was the route to a permanent home for the people.

The leaders were offered the American Dream, the right to own their own property as individuals, inviolate from the vagaries of shifting Indian policy. They’d never be forced off their lands again. There would be no more graves along a dusty road. All they had to do was agree to surrender their allegiance to land held in common and agree to private property. With heavy hearts, they sat in council all summer, struggling to decide and weighing the options, which were few. Families were divided against families. Stay in Kansas on communal land and run the risk of losing it all, or go to Indian Territory as individual landowners with a legal guarantee. This historic council met all that hot summer in a shady place that came to be known as the Pecan Grove.

We have always known that the plants and animals have their own councils, and a common language. The trees, especially, we recognize as our teachers. But it seems no one listened that summer when the Pecans counseled: Stick together, act as one. We Pecans have learned that there’s strength in unity, that the lone individual can be picked off as easily as the tree that has fruited out of season. The teaching of Pecans were not heard, or heeded.

And so our families packed the wagon one more time and moved west to Indian Territory, to the promised land, to become the Citizen Potawatomi. Tired and dusty but hopeful for their future, they found an old friend their first night on the new lands: a pecan grove. They rolled their wagons beneath the shelter of its branches and began again. Every tribal member, even my grandpa, a baby in arms, was given title to an allotment of land the federal government deemed sufficient for making a living as a farmer. By accepting citizenship, they ensured that their allotments couldn’t be taken from them. Unless, of course, a citizen could not pay his taxes. Or a rancher offered a keg of whiskey and a lot of money, ‘fair and square.’ Any unallocated parcels were mapped up by non-Indian settlers just as hungry squirrels snap up pecans. During the allotment era, more than two-thirds of the reservation lands were lost. Barely a generation after land was ‘guaranteed’ through the sacrifice of common land converted to private property, most of it was gone.

The pecan trees and their kin show a capacity for concerted action, for unity of purpose that transcends the individual trees. They ensure somehow that all stand together and thus survive. How they do so is still elusive. There’s some evidence that certain cues from the environment may trigger fruiting, like a particularly wet spring or a long growing season. These favorable physical conditions help all the trees achieve an energy surplus that they can spend on nuts. But, given the individual differences in habitat, it seems unlikely that environment alone could be the key to synchrony.

In the old times, our elders say, the trees talked to each other. They’d stand in their own council and craft a plan. But scientists decided long ago that plants were deaf and mute, locked in isolation without communication. The possibility of conversation was summarily dismissed. Science pretends to be purely rational, completely neutral, a system of knowledge-making in which the observation is independent of the observer. And yet the conclusion was drawn that plants cannot communicate because they lack the mechanisms that animals use to speak. The potentials for plants were seen purely through the lens of animal capacity. Until quite recently no one seriously explored the possibility that plants might ‘speak’ to one another. But pollen has been carried reliably on the wind for eons, communicated by males to receptive females to make those very nuts. If the wind can be trusted with that fecund responsibility, why not with messages?

There’s now compelling evidence that our elders were right — the trees are talking to one another. They communicate via pheromones, hormonelike compounds that are wafted on the breeze, laden with meaning. Scientists have identified specific compounds that one tree will release when it’s under the stress of insect attack — gypsy moths gorging on its leaves or bark beetles under its skin. The tree sends out a distress call: ‘Hey, you guys over there? I’m under attack here. You might want to raise the drawbridge and arm yourselves for what’s coming your way.’ The downwind trees catch the drift, sensing those few molecules of alarm, the whiff of danger. This gives them time to manufacture defensive chemicals. Forewarned is forearmed. The trees warn each other and the invaders are repelled. The individual benefits, and so does the entire grove. Trees appear to be talking about mutual defense. Could they also communicate to synchronize masting? There’s so much we cannot yet sense with our limited human capacity. Tree conversations are still far above our heads.

Some studies of mast fruiting have suggested that the mechanism for synchrony comes not through the air, but underground. The trees in a forest are often interconnected by subterranean networks of mycorrhizae, fungal strands that inhabit tree roots. The mycorrhizal symbiosis enables the fungi to forage for mineral nutrients in the soil and deliver them to the tree in exchange for carbs. The mycorrhizae may form fungal bridges between individual trees, so that all trees in a forest are connected. These fungal networks appear to redistribute the wealth of carbs from tree to tree. A kind of Robin Hood, they take from the rich and give to the poor so that all trees arrive at the same carbon surplus at the same time. They weave a web of reciprocity, of giving and taking. In this way, the trees all act as one because the fungi have connected them. Through unity, survival.”

“As a scientist I’m well aware of how little we do know. The plant has bee up all night assembling little packets of sugar and seeds and fragrance and color, because when it does its evolutionary fitness is increased. When it’s successful in enticing an animal such as me to disperse its fruit, its genes for making yumminess are passed on to ensuing generations with a higher frequency than those of the plant whose berries were inferior. The berries made by the plants shape the behaviors of the dispersers and have adaptive consequences.

What I mean of course is that our human relationship with strawberries is transformed by our choice of perspective. It is human perception that makes the world a gift. When we view the world this way, strawberries and humans alike are transformed. The relationship of gratitude and reciprocity thus developed can increase the evolutionary fitness of both plant and animal. A species and a culture that treat the natural world with respect and reciprocity will surely pass on genes to ensuing generations with a higher frequency than the people who destroy it.”

“Color perception in humans relies on banks of specialized receptor cells, the rods and cones in the retins. The job of the cone cells is to absorb light of different wavelengths and pass it on to the brain’s visual cortex, where it can be interpreted. The visible light spectrum, the rainbow of colors, is broad, so the most effective means of discerning color is not one generalized jack-of-all-trades cone cell, but rather an array of specialists, each perfectly tuned to absorb certain wavelengths. The human eye has three kinds. One type excels at detecting red and associated wavelengths. One is tuned to blue. The other optimally perceives light of two colors: purple and yellow.

The human eye is superbly equipped to detect these colors and send a signal pulsing to the brain. This doesn’t explain why I perceive them as beautiful, but it does explain why that combo gets my undivided attention. I asked my artist buddies about the power of purple and gold, and they sent me right to the color wheel: these two are complementary colors, as different in nature as could be. In composing a palette, putting them together makes each more vivid; just a touch of one will bring out the other. In an 1890 treatise on color perception, Goethe, who was both a scientist and a poet, wrote that ‘the colors diametrically opposed to each other…are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye.’ Purple and yellow are a reciprocal pair.

Our eyes are so sensitive to these wavelengths that the cones can get oversaturated and the stimulus pours over onto the other cells. A printmaker I know showed me that if you stare for a long time at a block of yellow and then shift your gaze to a white sheet of paper, you will see it, for a moment, as violet. This phenomenon — the colored afterimage — occurs because there’s energetic reciprocity between purple and yellow pigments, which goldenrod and asters knew well before we did.

If my adviser was correct, the visual effect that so delights a human like me may be irrelevant to the flowers. The real beholder whose eye they hope to catch is a bee bent on pollination. Bees perceive many flowers differently than humans do due to their perception of additional spectra such as UV radiation. As it turns out, though, goldenrod and asters appear very similarly to bee eyes and human eyes. We both think they’re beautiful. Their striking contrast when they grow together makes them the most attractive target in the whole meadow, a beacon for bees. Growing together, both receive more pollinator visits than they would if they were growing alone. It’s a testable hypothesis; it’s a question of science, a question of art, and a question of beauty.”

Language

“There was a great deal of excitement about the class because, for the first time, every single fluent speaker in our tribe would be there as a teacher. When the speakers were called forward to the circle of folding chairs, they moved slowly — with canes, walkers, and wheelchairs, only a few entirely under their own power. I counted them as they filled the chairs. Nine. Nine fluent speakers. In the whole world. Our language, millennia in the making, sits in those nine chairs. The words that praised creation, told the old stories, lulled my ancestors to sleep, rests today in the tongues of nine very mortal men and women. Each in turn addresses the small group of would-be students.

A man with long gray braids tells how his mother hid him away when the Indian agents came to take the children. He escaped boarding school by hiding under an overhung bank where the sound of the stream covered his crying. The others were all taken and had their mouths washed out with soap, or worse, for ‘talking that dirty Indian language.’”

“Together, we learn to count and to say pass the salt. Someone asks, ‘How do you say please pass the salt?’ Our teacher, Justin Neely, a young man devoted to language revival, explains that while there are several words for thank you, there’s no word for please. Food was meant to be shared, no added politeness needed. It was simply a cultural given that one was asking respectfully. The missionaires took this absence of further evidence of crude manners.”

“In English, we never refer to a member of our family, or indeed to any person, as it. That would be a profound act of disrespect. It robs a person of selfhood and kinship, reducing a person to a mere thing. So it is that in Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our families. Because they are our family.”

Nurturing

“Wild meadow sweetgrass grows long and fragrant when it’s looked after by humans. Weeding and care for the habitat and neighboring plants strengthens its growth.”

“Maples have a far more sophisticated system for detecting spring than we do. There are photosensors by the hundreds in every single bud, packed with light-absorbing pigments called phytochromes. Their job is to take the measure of light every day. Tightly furled, covered in red-brown scales, each bud holds an embryonic copy of a maple branch, and each bud wants desperately to someday be a full-fledged branch, leaves rustling in the wind and soaking up sun. But if the buds come out too soon they’ll be killed by freezing. Too late and they’ll miss the spring. So the buds keep the calendar. But those baby buds need energy for their growth into branches — like all newborns, they’re hungry.”

“There was a custom in the mid-1800s of planting twin trees to celebrate a marriage and the starting of a home. The stance of these two, just 10 feet apart, recalls a couple standing together on the porch steps, holding hands. The reach of their shade links the front porch with the barn across the road, creating a shady path of back and forth for that young family.

I realize that those first homesteaders were not the beneficiaries of that shade, at least not as a young couple. They must have meant for their people to stay here. Surely those two were sleeping up on Cemetery Road long before the shade arched across the road. I’m living today in the shady future they imagined, drinking sap from trees planted with their wedding vows. They could not have imagined me, many generations later, and yet I live in the gift of their care.”

“I looked through the gifts for tags or a card, but there was nothing to show who had made the late delivery. I hunted for a clue. I smoothed the purple paper tight on one gift to read the lab underneath. It was a jar of Vicks VapoRub! A little note fell from the twisted tissue paper: ‘Take comfort.’ I recognized the handwriting immediately as my cousin’s, dear enough to be my sister, who lives hours away. My fairy godmother left 18 notes and presents, one for every year of mothering [my daughter]. A compass: ‘To find your new path.’ A packet of smoked salmon: ‘Because they always come home.’ Pens: ‘Celebrate having time to write.’

We are showered every day with gifts, but they aren’t meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.”

“Even a quantitative social psychologist would find no fault with my list of loving behaviors:

Nurturing health and well-being
Protection from harm
Encouraging individual growth and development
Desire to be together
Generous sharing of resources
Working together for a common goal
Celebration of shared values
Interdependence
Sacrifice by one for the other
Creation of beauty

If we observed these behaviors between humans, we would say, ‘She loves that person.’ You might also observe these actions between a person and a bit of carefully tended ground and say, ‘She loves that garden.’ Why then, seeing this list, would you not make the leap to say that the garden loves her back?”

“I once knew and loved a man who lived most of his life in the city, but when he was dragged off to the ocean or the woods he seemed to enjoy it well enough — as long as he could find an Internet connection. He had lived in a lot of places, so I asked him where he found his greatest sense of place. He didn’t understand the expression. I explained that I wanted to know where he felt most nurtured and supported. What is the place that you understand best? That you know best and knows you in return?

He didn’t take long to answer. ‘My car,’ he said. ‘In my car. It provides me with everything I need, in just the way I like it. My favorite music. Seat position fully adjustable. Automatic mirrors. Two cup holders. I’m safe. And it always takes me where I want to go.’ Years later, he tried to kill himself. In his car.

He never grew a relationship with the land, choosing instead the splendid isolation of tech. He was like one of those little withered seeds you find in the bottom of the seed packet, the one who never touched the earth.”

“In indigenous agriculture, the practice is to modify the plants to fit the land. As a result, there are many varieties of corn domesticated by our ancestors, all adapted to grow in different places. Modern agriculture, with its big engines and fossil fuels, took the opposite approach: modify the land to fit the plants, which are frighteningly similar clones.”

“Together the Three Sisters — corn, beans, and squash — feed the people, feed the land, and feed our imaginations, telling us how we might live.

For millennia, from Mexico to Montana, women have mounded up the earth and laid these three seeds in the ground, all in the same square foot of soil. When the colonists on the Massachusetts shore first saw indigenous gardens, they inferred that the savages didn’t know how to farm. To their minds, a garden meant straight rows of single species, not a 3D sprawl of abundance. And yet they ate their fill and asked for more, and more again.

Once planted in the May-moist earth, the corn seed takes on water quickly, its seed coat thin and its starchy contents, the endosperm, drawing water to it. The moisture triggers enzymes under the skin that cleave the starch into sugars, fueling the growth of the corn embryo that’s nestled in the point of the seed. Thus corn is the first to emerge from the ground, a slender white spike that greens within hours of finding the light. A single leaf unfurls, and then another. Corn is all alone at first, while the others are getting ready.

Drinking in soil water, the bean seed swells and bursts its speckled coat and sends a rootling down deep in the ground. Only after the root is secure does the stem bend to the shape of a hook and elbow its way above ground. Beans can take their time in finding the light because they are well provisioned: their first leaves were already packaged in the two halves of the bean seed. This pair of fleshy leaves now breaks the soil surface to join the corn, which is already six inches tall.

Pumpkins and squash take their time — they are the slow sister. It may be weeks before the first stems poke up, still caught in their seed coat until the leaves split its seams and break free. I’m told that our ancestors would put the squash seeds in a deerskin bag with a little water or urine a week before planting to try to hurry them along. But each plant has its own pace and the sequence of their germination, their birth order, is important to their relationship and to the success of the crop.”

“The other place where saplings were thriving was near communities of basket makers. Where the tradition of black ash basketry was alive and well, so were the trees. We hypothesized that the apparent decline in ash trees might be due not to overharvesting but to underharvesting. When communities echoed with Doonk, doonk, doonk, there were plenty of basket makers in the woods, creating gaps where the light would reach the seedlings and the young trees could shoot to the canopy and become adults. In places where the basket makers disappeared, or were few, the forest didn’t get opened up enough for black ash to flourish.

Black ash and basket makers are partners in a symbiosis between harvesters and harvested: ash relies on people as the people rely on ash. Their fates are linked.”

“The surprise was that the failing plots were not the harvested ones, as predicted, but the unharvested controls. The sweetgrass that hadn’t been picked or disturbed in any way was choked with dead stems while the harvested plots were thriving. Even though half of all stems had been harvested each year, they quickly grew back, completely replacing everything that had been gathered. In fact producing more shoots than were present before harvest. Picking sweetgrass seemed to actually stimulate growth. In the first year’s harvest, the plants that grew the very best were the ones that had been yanked up in a handful. But, whether it was pinched singly or pulled in a clump, the end result was nearly the same: it didn’t seem to matter how the grass was harvested, only that it was.”

“Grasses are beautifully adapted to disturbance — it’s why we plant lawns. When we mow them they multiply. Grasses carry their growing points just beneath the soil surface so that when their leaves are lost to a mower, a grazing animal, or a fire, they quickly recover.

Harvesting thins the population, allowing the remaining shoots to respond to the extra space and light by reproducing quickly. Even the pulling method was beneficial. The underground stem that connects the shoots is dotted with buds. When it’s gently tugged, the stem breaks and all those buds produce thrifty young shoots to fill the gap.

Many grasses undergo a physiological change known as compensatory growth in which the plant compensates for loss of foliage by quickly growing more. It seems counterintuitive, but when a herd of buffalo grazes down a sward of fresh grass, it actually grows faster in response. This helps the plant recover, but also invites the buffalo back for dinner later in the season. It’s even been discovered that there is an enzyme in the saliva of grazing buffalo that actually stimulates grass growth. To say nothing of the fertilizer produced by a passing herd. Grass gives to buffalo and buffalo gives to grass.

The system is well-balanced, but only if the herd uses the grass respectfully. Free-range buffalo graze and move on, not returning to the same place for many months. Thus they obey the rule of not taking more than half, of not overgrazing. Why shouldn’t it also be true for people and sweetgrass? We are no more than the buffalo and no less, governed by the same natural laws.”

“Few of us live in round houses anymore, where there are no walls or corners. Indigenous architecture tends to the small and round, though, following the model of nests and dens and burrows and redds and eggs and wombs — as if there were some universal pattern for home. With our backs leaning against the saplings, we consider this convergence of design. A sphere has the highest ratio of volume to surface area, minimizing the materials needed for living space. Its form sheds water and distributes the weight of a snow load. It’s efficient to heat and resistant to wind.”

Wetlands

“The cattails have made a superb material for shelter in leaves that are long, water repellant, and packed with closed-cell foam for insulation. In the old times, fine mats of cattail leaves were sewn or twined to sheathe a summer wigwam. In dry weather, the leaves shrink apart from one another and let the breeze waft between them for ventilation. When the rains come, they swell and close the gap, making the mat waterproof. Cattails also make fine sleeping mats. The wax keeps away moisture from the ground and the aerenchyma provide cushioning and insulation. A couple of cattail mats — soft, dry, and smelling like fresh hay — under your sleeping bag make for a cozy night.

Squeezing the soft leaves between her fingers, Natalie says, ‘It’s almost as if the plants made these things for us.’ The parallels between the adaptations evolved by the plants and the needs of the people are indeed striking. In some Native languages the term for plants translates to ‘those who take care of us.’”

“The diversity of salmon in the river — Chinook, Chum, Pink, and Coho — ensured that the people would not go hungry, likewise the forests. Swimming many miles inland, they brought a much-needed resource for the trees: nitrogen. The spent carcasses of spawned-out salmon, dragged into the woods by bears and eagles and people, fertilized the trees as well as Skunk Cabbage. Using stable isotope analysis, scientists traced the source of nitrogen in the wood of ancient forests all the way back to the ocean. Salmon fed everyone.”

“The diking changed the river from a capillary system to a single straightened flow to hurry the river to the sea. It might have been good for cows, but it was disastrous for young salmon who were now unceremoniously flushed to the sea.

The transition to salt water is a major assault on the body chemistry of a salmon born in freshwater. One fish biologist likens it to the rigors of a chemotherapy transfusion. The fish needs a gradual transition zone, a halfway house of sorts. The brackish water of estuaries, the wetland buffer between river and ocean, plays a critical role in salmon survival.”

Pioneer Species

“Unbilicaria is often the victim of its own success. Accumulation is its undoing. Slowly, slowly the lichens build up a thin layer of debris around them, perhaps their own exfoliations, or dust, or falling needles — the flotsam of the forest. The dusting of organic matter holds the moisture that the bare rock couldn’t hold and gradually an accretion of soil creates a habitat for mosses and ferns. Through the laws of ecological succession, the lichens have done their work of laying the foundation for others, and now the others have come.”

“Forest ecosystems have tools for dealing with massive disturbance, evolved from a history of blowdown, landslide, and fire. The early successional plant species arrive immediately and get to work on damage control. These plants — known as opportunistic, or pioneer, species — have adaptations that allow them to thrive after disturbance. Because resources like light and space are plentiful, they grow quickly. A patch of bare ground around here can disappear in a few weeks. Their goal is to grow and reproduce as fast as possible, so they don’t bother themselves with making trunks but rather madly invest in leaves, leaves, and more leaves borne on the flimsiest of stems.

The key to success is to get more of everything than your neighbor, and to get it faster. That life strategy works when resources seem to be infinite. But pioneer species, not unlike pioneer humans, require cleared land, hard work, individual initiative, and numerous children. In other words, the window of opportunity for opportunistic species is short. Once trees arrive on the scene, the pioneers’ days are numbered, so they use their photosynthetic wealth to make babies that will be carried by birds to the next clear-cut. As a result, many are berry makers: salmonberry, elderberry, huckleberry, blackberry.

The pioneers produce a community based on the principles of unlimited growth, sprawl, and high energy consumption, sucking up resources as fast as they can, wresting land from others through competition, and then moving on. When resources begin to run short, as they always will, cooperation and strategies that promote stability — strategies perfected by rainforest ecosystems — will be favored by evolution. The breadth and depth of these reciprocal symbioses are especially well developed in old-growth forests, which are designed for the long haul.

Industrial forestry, resource extraction, and other aspects of human sprawl are like salmonberry thickets — swallowing up land, reducing biodiversity, and simplifying ecosystems at the demand of societies always bent on having more. In 500 years we exterminated old-growth cultures and old-growth ecosystems, replacing them with opportunistic culture. Pioneer human communities, just like pioneer plant communities, have an important role in regeneration, but they aren’t sustainable in the long run. When they reach the edge of easy energy, balance, and renewal are the only way forward, wherein there is a reciprocal cycle between early and late successional systems, each opening the door for the other.”

Cedar Reforestation

“Cedar homes, constructed of both logs and planks, were emblematic of the region. The wood split so readily that, in skilled hands, dimensional boards could be made without a saw. Sometimes trees were felled for lumber, but planks were more often split from naturally fallen logs. Remarkably, Mother Cedar also yielded planks from her living flanks. When a line of wedges of stone or antler were pounded into a standing tree, long boards would pop from the trunk along the straight grain. The wood itself is dead supportive tissue, so the harvest of a few boards from a big tree doesn’t risk killing the whole organism — a practice that redefines our notions of sustainable forestry: lumber produced without killing a tree.

Now, however, industrial forestry dictates how the landscape is shaped and used. To own the land at Shotpouch, which is designated as timberlands, Franz was required to register an approved forest management plan for his new property. He wryly wrote his dismay that his land was classified ‘not as forestland, but timberland,’ as if the sawmill was the only possible destiny for a tree. Franz had an old-growth mind in a Doug Fir world.

The Oregon Department of Forestry and the college of Forestry at OSU offered Franz technical assistance, prescribing herbicides to quell the brush and replanting with genetically improved Douglas fir. If you can ensure plenty of light by eliminating understory competition, Douglas fir makes timber faster than anything else around. But Franz didn’t want timber. He wanted a forest.”

“Despite its huge stature, cedar has tiny seeds, flakes wafted on the wind from delicate cones not more than half an inch long. 400,000 cedar seeds add up a single pound. It’s a good thing that the adults have a whole millennium to reseed themselves. In the profusion of growth in these forests, such a speck of life has almost no chance at all to establish a new tree.

While adult trees are tolerant of the various stresses that an always changing world throws their way, the young are quite vulnerable. Red cedar grows more slowly than the other species who quickly overtop it and steal the sun — especially after a fire or logging, it is almost entirely outcompeted by species better adapted to the dry, open conditions. If red cedars do survive, despite being the most shade tolerant of all the western species, they don’t flourish but rather bide their time, waiting for a windthrow or a death to punch a hole in the shade. Given the opportunity, they climb that transient shaft of sunlight, step by step, making their way to the canopy. But most never do. Forest ecologists estimate that the window of opportunity for cedars to get started occurs perhaps only twice in a century. So at Shotpouch, natural recolonization was out. In order to have cedars in the restored forest, Franz had to plant them.

Given all cedar’s traits — slow growth, poor competitive ability, susceptibility to browsing, wildly improbable seeding establishment — one would expect it to be a rare species. But it’s not. One explanation is that while cedars can’t compete well on uplands, they thrive with wet feet in alluvial soils, swamps, and water edges that other species can’t stand. Their favorite habitat provides them with a refuge from competition. Accordingly, Franz carefully selected creekside areas and planted them thickly with cedar.

The unique chemistry of cedar endows it with both life-saving and tree-saving medicinal properties. Rich with many highly antimicrobial compounds, it’s especially resistant to fungi. Northwest forests, like any ecosystem, are susceptible to outbreaks of disease, the most significant of which is laminated root rot caused by the native fungus Phellinus weirii. While this fungus can be fatal for Doug firs, hemlock, and other trees, the red cars are blessedly immune. When root rot strikes the others, the cedars are poised to fill in the empty gaps, freed of competition. The Tree of Life survives in patches of death.

After years of working alone to keep the cedar thriving, Franz found someone who shared his notion of a good time: planting trees and chopping salmonberry. Franz’s first date with Dawn was on the ridgetop at Shotpouch. Over the following 11 years, they planted more than 13,000 trees and created a network of trails with names that reflect intimacy with their 40 acres.”