The Overstory: Part 4: Seeds Summary & Analysis

The narrative describes the history of Earth as if it all happened in one day, from midnight to midnight. Life doesn’t begin until three or four in the morning, and plants and insects don’t arrive on land until ten at night. Humanoids appear just seconds before midnight, and what we think of as humans only in the last second. Yet a few fractions of a second after that, most of the planet has been irreversibly changed, and the tree of life begins to fall.

Nick Hoel wakes up in a tent in the middle of the woods. He rises with the dawn and sings to himself and to the birds, making a fire and then coffee. Meanwhile Mimi Ma sits in Dolores Park in San Francisco, reading the news about Adam’s prison sentence. She knows that Douglas is the one who betrayed him, and Mimi feels like she should be in prison too. As Mimi searches for terms related to Adam Appich, other “invisible eyes” read along with her, absorbing every pattern they can find.

Douglas is in his prison cell, though it’s the nicest place he’s lived in decades. He is listening to an audio course called “Introduction to Dendrology.” Douglas loves listening to the professor on the tapes, who has a speech impediment. The woman explains the “Day of Life,” imagining all of Earth’s history as taking place over the course of a single day. When she gets to the last second of the day, with humans and their factory farms, Douglas yanks out his earbuds and screams out loud.

While Mimi, still in Dolores Park, feels like she will be arrested any minute, Adam waits to be sent to federal prison. Lying in his bunk, he thinks about how everything that he and his fellow activists hoped to save is already gone: “Humans are all that count, the final word,” and their endless hunger for more cannot be slowed. Adam knows that there is a catastrophe coming for humanity, though it likely won’t come soon enough to exonerate him of his actions.

As he listens to his audio courses, Douglas longs to see a tree again. He closes his eyes and waits until they appear in his memory; thinking of them feels that he has lived a very rich live after all. At the same time, he feels the “seed” of a tumor growing in his side. Meanwhile Neelay works on his new project, with new coders using all the information that his “creatures” can find. There is no need to write anything from scratch—the world they live in is already the most complex game there is.

More of Neelay’s bots (described as “learners”) watch Mimi as she searches related topics on her phone, finally coming to a video that holds her attention. It focuses on a massive stump that Mimi recognizes as Mimas. Gas burners then inflate an enormous balloon in the shape of a tree, rising from the stump and set against the background of countless other massive stumps—a single ephemeral tree in the wasteland.

The balloon-tree lingers for a moment, and then around its base Mimi sees the arhats from her father’s scroll, and the words of the scroll’s poem. Mimi is stunned, and then she remembers Nick Hoel spending hours sketching in her house. He must have been drawing the arhat scroll as well. In the video, the balloon tree starts to go up in flames, ending with just a wisp of smoke over the clear-cut hillside. Seeing it, Mimi feels an old desire to “bomb something.” The video ends with a verse from the Bible about trees—how they can always regrow from the roots, while humans waste away and disappear.

Nick himself is working on another art project out in the northern woods, but this one will not be for any cameras. He is constructing an enormous sculpture in the middle of nowhere, to eventually fade away into nature. His materials are only fallen wood, some pieces small enough for him to carry by hand, while others that require a block and tackle. As he works, Nick thinks about how the sculpture must look when seen from above. He stops for lunch, and then is surprised to see another human being, a man in a red plaid coat who says he had heard that there was a “crazy white man” working nearby. Nick says it must be him, and the stranger shakes his head and starts helping him to move the wood.

Neelay’s bots travel the world, looking through the eyes of phones, cameras, and satellites, learning about forests and the clear-cut lands that grow every minute. As Neelay absorbs the information they gather, he feels a sense of grief that he will not live long enough to see the future that his creations will make. Neelay thinks of the sci-fi story he loved as a child about the aliens who moved so quickly that “human seconds seem to them as tree years seem to humans.”

Mimi still sits under the same pine tree, twisting her jade ring—Fusang, the tree of the future—around her finger, but unable to remove it. Then she remembers Adam saying that the only thing that can change people’s minds is a “good story,” and she realizes what he is trying to do: “he has traded his life for a fable that might light up the minds of strangers.” Meanwhile, Adam himself replays his latest fight with Lois and wonders what exactly he has saved by taking the actions that he has. All the while, Neelay’s watchers cross the world, trying to learn “what life wants from humans.”

Mimi looks around at the trees of the park and the city surrounding her as the day fades. She leans back against the pine tree and tries to reach Douglas in her mind. Suddenly she realizes that he, too, has made a sacrifice for her sake, one even more terrible than Adam’s. Douglas gave up his own life and incriminated Adam as well, just to save her. Mimi wants to scream upon realizing this. She knows that Douglas will torture himself if he doesn’t hear from her, but she has no way to reach him and say what she now wants to say: “that his heart is as good and as worthy as wood.”

Douglas returns to the audio lectures, as the professor describes seeds that only open when exposed to fire and then returns to her theme of the tree of life. At one point she says, “Let me sing to you, about how creatures become other things.” The professor then asks why we didn’t do more to stop the tree of life from toppling again. At this point, Douglas has to stop the tape and lie down. Again, he feels the tumor in his side and feels guilty for sending Adam to prison for the rest of his life. He cries out aloud and apologizes, though he knows that no forgiveness is coming.

The man in the red plaid coat continues to help Nick with his project. They don’t exchange names, but only work together to roll the logs into place. They stop for dinner and finally Nick comments on how much the trees speak when one is simply quiet and open to hearing them. The man laughs and says, “We’ve been trying to tell you that since 1492.” Nick then remarks that he’ll need to restock on food soon, and the man laughs again, looking around the forest as if it is full of food for the taking. Nick suddenly understands what the beings of light were trying to tell Olivia: “the most wondrous products of four billion years of life” that need help are not the trees, but humans.

Neelay continues his work, sending his watchful algorithms everywhere to absorb everything about nature that they can. Elsewhere Adam is finally sent away to federal prison, where he meets his new peers. These men will beat Adam up many times, the narrator notes, “not for being a terrorist, but for siding with the enemies of human progress.” As Adam enters the prison, he imagines all the destruction and extinction that will happen beyond the building’s walls during the time of his sentence. Adam checks in with an official and notices a seed stuck to his own shoulder. Somehow it found its way there, though he has only moved from one prison to another. Adam feels that he, along with his four co-conspirators and all of humanity itself have always been like this: vessels for life to use.

Eventually Neelay’s creations begin the process of translating between “human language and the language of green things.” Neelay himself watches them, knowing that he will not live to see the end of this new game—a game about life itself beyond the limits of humanity—but that he has at least helped it grow. Overwhelmed, Neelay drives his wheelchair out to his usual grove of trees and breathes in all their various aromas. At last, he hears them speak again, in his father’s voice, asking “what might this little creature do?”

Dorothy reads aloud the news about Adam’s sentence to Ray, who moans in anguish. “Self-defense,” he says, and Dorothy asks him how that could have been Adam’s legal argument. Ray cannot say all the words he wants to, so tries to relate his argument only through his eyes. “If you could save yourself, your wife, your child, or even a stranger by burning something down, the law allows you. If someone breaks into your home and starts destroying it, you may stop them however you need to.” Dorothy cannot understand him, though Ray tries his best to communicate: our collective home has been broken into, and so we are allowed to use all necessary force to defend it.

Ray reaches a new realization, that the law must judge “imminent harm” not using human time, but at the rate of trees. As he thinks this his brain floods with blood once more, and he can see all the trees in his backyard growing through the interval of “two life sentences,” racing towards the sky and endlessly branching out into new possibilities. Dorothy calls his name, but it is too late, and Ray is dead. The narrator notes that atop the pile of books at her feet is Patricia’s last work, The New Metamorphosis, containing a passage about Ovid’s myth of Baucis and Philemon turning into trees. “What we care for, we will grow to resemble,” she writes, “and what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer.”

Mimi still sits beneath the pine tree as darkness falls over Dolores Park. She manages to remove the jade ring from her finger and places it in the grass. At midnight she achieves a kind of enlightenment and is able to understand some of the signals constantly being passed between everything green that lives. They tell her about seeds and how some seeds need fire, or ice, or to be smashed open before they will germinate. Mimi then recognizes that the planet is transforming into something else, and that the seeds and the forests will survive, but only once the “real world” ends. Mimi stays there until dawn, finally awakened by a police officer, but is unable to speak aloud.

The day after Nick meets him, the man in the red plaid coat returns with three other strong-looking men and some equipment, all ready to continue the work of moving logs and finishing Nick’s sculpture. They work for hours, and then stand looking at the thing they’ve created. “It’s good,” says the man in plaid, and then he and the others start to chant in an old language. Nick can only add “Amen.” High above, satellites are already taking pictures of what they have created: the word “STILL,” made of fallen trees and visible from space. In the eyes of the “learners,” the word is already growing and blossoming, forming new connections that no human eye can see. Nick bids the men farewell and senses a voice from the trees saying that “What we have been given. What we must earn. This will never end.”