A ROOM WITH A POINT OF VIEW
A FRESH GREEN HORIZON FOR OUR KIDS
Most of us are fond of trees – in a manner of speaking. We like the flowering magnolia or enjoy the fruits of apple, pear and cherry trees. But how much do we really know about them? Image credit: ROBERT COLLINS on Unsplash.
By SHAGORIKA EASWAR
Diana Beresford-Kroeger was approaching her eightieth birthday while working on Our Green Heart, as she reveals in the introduction.
“I am not a person who thinks much about my age, but I suppose there is some cause for reflection and appraisal in that milestone.”
While she sees many fundamental questions still waiting to be answered as she looks around her, those who have followed her work and enjoyed her unique philosophical – almost poetic – approach to science, see a remarkable body of work.
She was the first to publish on tree aerosols in 2000, for instance.
All flying pollinators rely on aerosol messages from plants, she writes.
But the lady is not one to dwell on accolades and instead, gets right down to drawing our attention to urgent issues.
The war is on. There are two sides – Homo sapiens and carbon dioxide.
She combines ancient Celtic knowledge handed down to her by family, and the modern discipline of science and medicine that she studied, using one to “test” the other. Could the wisdom that Nellie and others had shared with me, my ancient inheritance, be confirmed by scientific fact?
She admits she was skeptical. Until the revelation that a plant used by Druidic physicians in their sweathouses contains hydrophilic colloidal binders that stabilize and potentiate other medicines.
The ancients knew of what they spoke (and practised) after all.
There’s wry humour in her writing, too.
When we plant the wrong tree in the wrong place, we are hoping and praying for a donkey to win the Kentucky Derby. It won’t – now or ever.
She also draws on knowledge from other cultures.
Such as mast, from Sanskrit, which describes an abundance, an extra-fruitful year so that all creatures in the web of life obtain an excess of food.
She describes oxidation-reduction reactions in the same breath as her great-aunt Nellie’s silent communion with a giant ash tree.
Writing of processes that make our air breathable and our planet livable, of “an innate intelligence that science only barely grasps”, she cautions that we are destroying this incredible gift blindly.
Beresford-Kroeger lists all the trees that are lost or on the verge of being lost. It is a long list.
Most of us are fond of trees – in a manner of speaking. We like the flowering magnolia or enjoy the fruits of apple, pear and cherry trees. But how much do we really know about them?
From the book I learn, for instance, that trees produce excess pollen when stressed. Or use “a biochemical axe, aborting seeds, leaves and even branches” if needed.
Or this sweet bit of information that is guaranteed to make you go aww.
“The germ plasm from ancient trees has seen and endured variations of temperatures in the past. Their epigenetics hold a memory of stress. A mixture of very old trees with very young trees is healthy for any forest anywhere. The grandparent plasm can inject the grandchild with the knowledge necessary to survive.
Beresford-Kroeger owns a farm and an arboretum in Ontario where she strives to foster endangered trees. One of them being the shellbark hickory.
Her arboretum is something of a Noah’s Ark, she writes, where she’s “attempting, against all odds and with very little money to maintain and protect some of the most valuable genetic traits in trees.”
She makes a point of the economic value of trees, too.
Nut milk, creams, cheeses and tofu can be a new industry, she writes. And cites recent research from Anantpur in Southern India which shows that the old style of growing woody perennials alongside agricultural crops can increase carbon dioxide sequestration from the atmosphere by 34 per cent.
Beresford-Kroeger shares her story of carrying water in buckets as a child in the valley of Lisheens in Ireland to explain her passion for water conservation, describing herself as a miser with water in every task she undertakes.
“And that is exactly as it should be.”
Our Green Heart by Diana Beresford-Kroeger is published by Random House Canada, $35.
She extols the benefits of forest bathing in dealing with everything from loneliness and anxiety to depression. And adds that while the Japanese lead the way today, it was practised by ancient Celts and Indigenous Peoples, too.
This book is about hope, she writes. This book is about tomorrow. A fresh green horizon for us all.
But it won’t happen without a little help from us. Cue Beresford-Kroeger’s Bioplan: Plant native trees, one per person per year for the next six years. If that seems overwhelming, perhaps start with one? So that, as the poet in her hopes, “These saplings and our children will go hand in hand into the future”.