The Island of Missing Trees

Underground now, the fig tree thinks about what Ada said to Kostas: “Your fig gives me the creeps.” The fig thinks that Ada is right to say there’s more to her than one might think, but that doesn’t make her “creepy.” The fig tree thinks that humans don’t really want to know more about plants. They don’t want to know whether plants are “capable of volition, altruism and kinship.” Humans avoid seeking out that knowledge, the fig tree says, because they’re afraid they might be disturbed by what they find. The tree describes how plants communicate and respond to threats. Trees in particular use a network of underground fungi to warn nearby trees about approaching danger. And the rings of a tree record not just its age but also its traumas, including wildfires it has survived.

Humans don’t want to know about the more complex aspects of how trees and plants function, the fig tree says; instead, they want to use trees and plants for their own purposes without thinking about how their actions may impact those plants. The tree says she “adores light.” By promising to give plants light, humans can bend them to their will. Unlike human time, which is linear, the tree says that for plants, time is “cyclical, recurrent, perennial.” The present is not a single moment. Instead, “it draws circles within circles, like the rings you find when you cut [trees] down.” Arboreal time, the tree says, functions similarly to how time functions in stories.