The Overstory

As a child in 1950, Patricia Westerford creates tiny creatures out of seeds, sticks, and leaves to play with. She rarely speaks, and for years her parents are worried that she has a mental disability. Finally, a doctor discovers that she is deaf, and now she wears hearing aids, though she doesn’t like them. Patty (Patricia) and her father Bill Westerford are extremely close, and Bill understands both her tiny, created worlds and her slurred speech. Bill is an agriculture extension agent, and he frequently tours farms around southwestern Ohio, taking Patty along with him. Though Patty’s mother objects, Bill convinces her that these trips will teach their daughter more than any classroom could.

As they drive together on their road trips, Bill teaches Patty all about trees and then quizzes her on her knowledge. She loves answering one particular question: that a name carved four feet high in a beech tree will still be four feet high after 50 years of growth. Eventually she starts to realize what her father is trying to teach her: that plants have lives, personalities, and goals all their own. In school, Patty doesn’t relate to the other children at all, only finding refuge in her father and the world of plants.

Together on their work trips, Bill and Patty travel from farm to farm, all of them either suffering from blight or fast using up their topsoil in the pursuit of monocrops. Bill laments all the lost trees and how little humans know about how trees actually live and grow. From her father, Patty slowly learns that all human wisdom and factual knowledge is temporary, and that “the only dependable things are humility and looking.”

One day, Bill helps Patricia design an experiment to find out where all the bulk of a tree comes from, such that it can grow from a tiny seed to something so huge. They weigh a tub of soil, weigh a small beechnut tree, and then plant the tree in the soil, as Bill explains how the word “beech” became the word “book.” Bill says they will weigh the tree and the soil again in six years, when Patty turns 16. Patty is delighted by this, and she realizes that she’s doing science.

Years pass, and Patty—now Patricia—is almost as knowledgeable as her father regarding trees. For her 14th birthday, Bill gives her a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Patricia is struck by the book’s first sentence: “Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.” She is drawn to the stories that follow, and especially loves the ones about people turning into trees, like the myth of Baucis and Philemon. The next winter, Bill is driving home when his car hits a patch of ice, and he is killed in the crash. Patricia reads from Ovid at the funeral. She is devastated and saves all of her father’s possessions.

Patricia barely survives high school, keeping to herself, dressing plainly, and avoiding boys. She gets into Eastern Kentucky University, where she will study botany. One day before she leaves for school, she remembers the beech tree that she and her father planted for their experiment. She is ashamed to have forgotten about it for two years longer than they had originally planned, and she spends an afternoon freeing the tree from its soil and weighing it. The tree has grown much heavier, she finds, but the soil weighs exactly the same. Patricia realizes what her father was trying to teach her: all the tree’s mass comes from the air, not the soil. She replants the tree beside the house and places a small notch in its bark, four feet above the ground.

Patricia blossoms at college, filling her dorm room with plants. She still doesn’t understand other people her age, but she is happy working at the campus greenhouses, taking classes, and reading. She prefers the natural history books from her father’s library to the novels that her peers enjoy. Though she doesn’t seek out attention, people are drawn to her authenticity and sureness. Boys even ask her out on dates. She goes out with one boy for a few months and has sex for the first time.

After college, Patricia goes to forestry school at Purdue. She teaches undergrads in exchange for room and board and can hardly believe her luck. By her second year, however, she starts to realize the “catch.” All her professors and peers believe in cleaning dead growth from forests, making them “thrifty” and economically beneficial. Patricia knows they are wrong—“a healthy forest must need dead trees”—but she doesn’t have data to back up her views. She hopes that her professors’ beliefs will eventually fade away, and then she will have her time to shine.

Patricia tries to teach her theories to her undergrads, and she generally gets on well with her fellow students despite their disagreements on forestry. She even has a brief romantic encounter with a woman in plant genetics, but she purposefully represses her embarrassed memory of it afterwards. Meanwhile, she continues to develop a theory that trees are actually social beings. No one else in the forestry school agrees, however.

Purdue receives a new machine—a quadrupole mass spectrometer—which Patricia realizes she can use to measure what gases trees release and how they affect other trees. She presents the idea to her advisor, saying that she believes trees behave differently in a wild forest than they do in cultivation. The advisor is skeptical but allows her to work as she sees fit. Patricia starts immediately and loves the often-monotonous work. Her experiment consists of taping plastic bags over the ends of branches to collect chemicals that the tree releases, and then bringing the samples back to the lab and analyzing them. Out in the woods all day, Patricia feels like her father is with her again, asking his penetrating questions. In her classes, she rhapsodizes about the wonder of trees.

Patricia earns her doctorate and starts going by “Dr. Pat Westerford” in an attempt to disguise her gender in writing. She becomes an adjunct professor in Madison, Wisconsin, and has lots of free time to continue her research. She studies sugar maples in a forest outside town, still collecting her bags of gas and analyzing them.

One day Patricia finds that one of her bagged trees is being attacked by insects. At first, she thinks her data is ruined, but after studying her samples she has an extraordinary revelation. She repeats the experiment several times before she allows herself to really believe what she’s seeing: that trees actually warn each other about possible threats. They release signals through the compounds they emit, protecting each other. When the data finally confirms this, Patricia starts to weep, feeling that she has glimpsed an entirely new aspect of life on Earth.

Patricia writes up her results, trying to use strictly scientific language and to focus on the data. Her paper is published in a scientific journal and then picked up by the press, and other papers run headlines about trees talking to one another. A few months later, the journal that originally published her paper runs a letter signed by three famous dendrologists. These men mock Patricia’s findings and conclusion. They also only refer to her as “Patricia” and never use the word “doctor” except in describing themselves. After the letter runs, Patricia stops getting asked for interviews, and other papers publicize her supposed debunking.

In the aftermath, Patricia isn’t renewed for her position at Madison, and she can’t find other work anywhere. Some friends sympathize with her, but no one publicly defends her work. She starts substitute teaching at high schools and grows dangerously depressed. Six months later, Patricia forages some deadly “Destroying Angel” mushrooms and cooks them into a gourmet meal for herself. She imagines that people will assume her death was an accident, as people die every year from consuming the wrong mushrooms.

Ready to eat her deadly meal, Patricia lifts a fork to her mouth and then feels her body flooded with signals, saying “Not this.” She drops her fork, experiencing a sudden clarity, and throws out her suicidal dinner. After this, she feels a new sense of freedom, like she has escaped the need for acceptance from other people and is now ready to discover anything.

Patricia then spends a few years outside of academia, working odd jobs and traveling. To others it seems like she is aimless and struggling, but really, she is busy “learning a foreign language.” She spends all her free time in the woods, just observing, sketching, and taking notes, reading John Muir and Henry David Thoreau, and foraging for her own food. She makes her way west, at peace with herself and forgiving the people who destroyed her career because of their own fear of wildness.

Patricia visits an aspen grove in Utah and stands weeping beneath the beautiful golden leaves, thinking about aspens throughout history. She finds a part of the grove where someone has been “improving things”—that is, chopping down trees—and she estimates that some of the downed trunks were 80 years old; yet she knows that they are not separate trees at all. She has come to this place because what seems to be an aspen forest is actually one single organism, a clone colony thousands of years old and hundreds of acres wide. She can hardly wrap her mind around it.

The narrative then briefly touches on Mimi Ma, Nicholas Hoel, Douglas Pavlicek, Dorothy Cazaly and Ray Brinkman, and Neelay Mehta, all spread across the country at that moment and involved in their own lives. None of them yet know each other, but the narrator notes that “their lives have long been connected, deep underground.” There is then an excerpt from the book that Patricia has yet to write: its opening passage is about how humans and trees share a single common ancestor from billions of years ago.

Still in the aspen grove, Patricia recognizes that the clone colony is slowly migrating to adapt to the changing climate. Looking around to see where it might go, she sees a new housing development cut into the heart of the trees. Patricia feels the weight of this impending tragedy and considers the war between humans and trees all over the world. She already knows “which side will lose by winning.”

Patricia eventually makes her way to the Pacific Northwest, where she first encounters an old-growth forest of conifers. She is floored by their size, “lost in reason’s opposite.” She wanders the forest, examining dead logs that are teeming with tiny creatures. She feels overwhelmed in the presence of so much life and death coexisting at once. She can understand why her old forestry professors would find such a place “decadent” and want it to be cleaned up, as all the decomposition thick around makes her feel like she’s in the frightening part of a fairy tale. Humans will always fear decay, she thinks. She continues through the forest, stopping at a cedar tree and thanking it out loud for all the things its wood can build, and all the gifts it has given.

Patricia starts working for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), living in a sparse cabin and spending her days cleaning up trash and tending to the forests. She loves everything about the work and the simple lifestyle, and she stays for 11 happy months. Back in the human world, however, a new paper is published in a famous scientific journal echoing her original findings about how trees communicate with each other. The paper cites her original research and reproduces her findings in new places.

One day, Patricia is out in the woods when she comes across two researchers. She watches them from a distance as one of the men summons an owl with his own imitation of its call. They photograph the bird and then disappear. Three weeks later, she finds the researchers again, this time examining beetles in a fallen log. They speak to her, and together they commiserate about the old forestry belief that fallen trunks should all be cleared away for a forests’ health.

The men discuss their research, which is essentially studying all the life within a dead log, and then the older man sees Patricia’s name tag and calls her “Dr. Westerford.” He says that he saw her speak years ago, and he’s glad that she has now been vindicated. Patricia clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Introducing himself as Henry and his companion as Jason, the man invites Patricia back to their research station to talk.

Soon after, Patricia is working with Henry Fallows, Jason, and several other researchers in the Cascades, where she finally feels part of a true community. Henry is the senior scientist, and he puts her on a grant. She lives in a trailer and has access to a mobile lab and spends two happy years working. Meanwhile, her reputation in the wider scientific community has been totally rehabilitated, and scientists everywhere continue to build on her work. Patricia doesn’t care about this, though, and she prefers her life working in the forest, surrounded by all the plants and animals she loves.

Patricia’s colleagues continue making new discoveries that confirm her intuitions and are radically different from the way humans usually think about trees. The old-growth forest they study is like a huge, complex, symbiotic organism, with each part partnering with every other part. Patricia herself now focuses on studying Douglas-firs. She finds that when the roots of two Douglas-firs contact each other underground, they graft together and join their vascular systems, sharing nutrients and essentially becoming a single tree. Patricia starts to think that nature isn’t just about fighting each other to survive. Instead, trees all seem to live by cooperation and sharing.

Henry Fallows wants Patricia to come back with them and teach at Corvallis, but she says she isn’t ready yet. Meanwhile Dennis Ward, the research station manager, brings Patricia little gifts whenever he comes by. She grows fond of him and his visits, and she likes that he respects her privacy and solitude.

One night Dennis brings Patricia a foraged dinner and asks her questions about her work. After dinner, they take their usual walk. Dennis talks to Patricia about what a happy, self-reliant person she is, but he says that it’s also nice to cook for her sometimes. He then asks if they could have an arrangement: keep their separate places but still see each other like they already do. Patricia is frightened at first, but then the offer suddenly seems both inevitable and comforting, and she can’t believe her luck to find a relationship like this. Dennis says that he would like to make the marriage official, though, just so she could get his pension when he dies. Patricia takes his hand in the dark, feeling like a tree at last finding the root of another tree to bond with deep underground.