Diana Beresford-Kroeger’s ‘Our Green Heart’ is a divine meditation on trees and life itself.
The famed author, medical biochemist and botanist — and, I might add, raconteur — has published a new book called Our Green Heart: The Soul and Science of Forests. It contains a universe of ideas, from rigorous scientific data to more esoteric concepts, all delivered in prose so rich that it reminds one of the layers of humus on the forest floor. There is perfume here, and poetry as well.
The book begins and ends with a poem, but poetry is threaded all the way through. It bursts forth in passages dedicated to transpiration in trees and erupts in riotous fashion as the author, now 80, summons her childhood memories growing up in Ireland.
Beresford-Kroeger’s work became more widely known after the documentary Call of the Forest was released in 2016, and Tyee fans might well remember her from Andrew Nikiforuk’s visit with the writer that became a Tyee series in 2020.
On the phone from Toronto, Beresford-Kroeger is immediately who you think she’s going to be: brimming with humour, incandescent with knowledge, quick with a quip and a few mild expletives.
As she explains over the phone, she lives like a monk, lacking both a cellphone and an email address. But she has single-handedly brought global attention to trees and their potential through her books.
None other than E.O. Wilson summed up the impact of her work with a ringing endorsement: “Who Speaks for the Trees, speaks for all of nature,” Wilson wrote. “Diana Beresford-Kroeger is one of the rare individuals who can accomplish this outwardly complex and difficult transition from the nonhuman to the human realms.”
It is the book that Beresford-Kroeger was meant to write. She tells me that when she was leaving Ireland, a fáid (prophet) told her that she would one day write something that would help the world.
The woman correctly predicted a number of things, including where Beresford-Kroeger would live, whom she would marry and that one day, she would write this book. Upon hearing her say this, a frisson of eeriness runs down my spine.
Where whimsy meets wisdom
Our Green Heart features scenes drawn from the author’s childhood, her experience as a young mother in rural Canada and her present-day incarnation as the first lady of the trees. The collection melds the practical and the prosaic.
In one essay, there is detailed explanation of how a leaf functions. In the next, a story follows the author bringing down an ancient curse upon a group of hunters who had mortally wounded a deer.
Beresford-Kroeger recalls with a laugh that while recording the audio version of the book, the producers kept asking about acquiring permission to use the two poems that open and close the book without realizing that they were also her work. It’s a telling story, as Our Green Heart is composed of equal parts beauty and scientific fact.
Part of the magic of Beresford-Kroeger’s work is how she shows that the two are not so different from each other. There is grace, symmetry and bounteous generosity in the natural world, and the same is true of her book. Even in the sections dedicated to hard science, there is whimsy and humour.
In one scene, Beresford-Kroeger introduces the complex science behind the process of photosynthesis with a story about being invited to give a talk at the National Arts Club in New York’s Gramercy Park.
Despite the rather fancy location, the host of the event assured her that it was a casual affair, and that she needn’t prepare anything in-depth — just a few remarks between coffee and dessert. But on the day of the luncheon, the speaker who preceded her offered an exhaustive presentation, complete with slides and multimedia elements.
Like anyone in such a situation, Beresford-Kroeger freaked out and fled, feeling foolish and ill-prepared. While she was standing in Gramercy Park plucking up her courage, she picked a green leaf off a tree. A handsome young man suddenly popped out of nowhere, quipping, “I see you have a tree star!”
Taking inspiration from this encounter, Beresford-Kroeger marched back into the venue, the leaf tucked within her palm. She gave the assembled crowd an off-the-cuff lecture about the marvels of photosynthesis and its connection to quantum reality. As she recounts in the chapter entitled, fittingly enough, “The Star of Nature,” her speech brought members of the audience to tears.
It’s an emblematic story in many ways, full of serendipitous happenstance, but also leading in a very specific direction. Namely, that the world is a mysterious place. And the longer you look at it, the more wondrous it becomes. But to truly get to the heart of things, close observation and attention are required.
To this end, Our Green Heart is both vast and minute, filled with appraisals of commonplace stuff like dirt, moss and trees.
These seemingly ordinary things run parallel to truly out-there stuff like quantum physics, atoms, electrons, the very make and matter of the universe. Sometimes these two things combine in the most unexpected fashion.
Upending the notion of a stable, predictable universe
In an early chapter, Beresford-Kroeger recounts the experience of attending an Irish wake as a young girl. A ragged figure arrives, bringing with him a strange energy. As she writes, “He was the seanchaí, the storyteller, a custodian of ancient lore; his job passed down his family’s line.”
The tradition of a wandering storyteller dates back centuries. The role evolved out of bardic tradition, where people retained huge amounts of knowledge, poetry and song in order to function as the collective memory of a culture. The practice of maintaining historical records through ancient oral traditions was still actively in use in Beresford-Kroeger’s childhood, but there was more to the practice than holding knowledge.
While talking about “the Ollúna, the master poets and historians of ancient times,” a kind of trance overtakes the man, and he begins to talk about bilocation, the ability to be in two places at once. A supposed impossibility, but according to quantum physics, maybe not so impossible after all.
The ability of electrons, shared with protons, to be in two places at the same time upended the notion of a stable, predictable universe. Electrons’ weird behaviour proved a great aggravation to physicist Albert Einstein, but as Beresford-Kroeger relates, ancient cultures wouldn’t have batted so much as an eye.
If Einstein had only looked up, Beresford-Kroeger maintains, he might have discovered the answer was directly overhead, contained in the lush canopies of the trees that dotted the Princeton campus.
What follows is a careful, exacting explication of how electrons and photons function on a subatomic level in trees. Beresford-Kroeger sums up these micro and macro forces in her book as being “orchestrated on scales simultaneously global and subatomic by an innate intelligence that science barely grasps — when it can get any grip at all.”
This is another element that pops up with metronomic frequency: the glaring gaps in scientific knowledge. Phrases such as “remains a mystery to science” or “don’t yet understand” are sprinkled liberally throughout the book.
Even the most basic principles of how trees and a forest function are not well understood by the scientific community.
There’s a reason for this.
The Orphan Tree
As a young Irishwoman working in the fields of science and medicine, Beresford-Kroeger was familiar with the people in power actively discounting the production of any knowledge that contravened the conventional wisdom of the day. Mainstream views held that trees were a resource simply waiting to be cut down, rather than a functioning society of caring, empathetic organisms.
In her book Finding the Mother Tree, Suzanne Simard recounts a similar experience having her research derided and undermined. Anything considered too mysterious, too soft and too female was deemed unscientific. Indigenous knowledge also fell into this category. But Our Green Heart makes clear that there are legions of things that science simply cannot explain. Other bodies of older knowledge offer a different path.
As a Brehon ward, Beresford-Kroeger received an education in ancient Druidic knowledge. She is one of the last children in Ireland to be gifted with this training.
In a chapter dedicated to this early training and education, she explains that different elders would send for her, and she would spend time with them, taking in wisdom passed down for centuries. Much of this information had to do with the workings of plants and animals.
This unique education, coupled with rigorous study (Beresford-Kroeger holds degrees in botany, biochemistry and biology), enables her to speak with total authority on everything from genetic smearing to the particularities of different tree species from across the globe. It also gave her poetry.
One of the most curious examples cited in Our Green Heart is the divination that forests make about the future. In a chapter entitled “Forest Mast,” Beresford-Kroeger explains that trees can suss out what is coming. They can anticipate whether they need to prepare for a bounteous year or to conserve forces, drop acorns early and knuckle down for a period of hardship.
Another mystery that science has yet to figure out is the missing link between ancient plant life (largely ferns) and trees proper. The transitional connector between these two has yet to be discovered. When she heard this, Beresford-Kroeger recounts, she immediately headed to the library to do her own research, building a fortress of books around herself as she read.
As a young woman working in the medical and scientific field, she faced prejudice for her sex and her heritage, as well as her inability to suffer pomposity and arrogance. It’s a common experience that many of her predecessors as well as her contemporaries continue to face.
After moving to Canada with her husband, Beresford-Kroeger established her own arboretum on her farm near Merrickville, Ontario. Part of this initiative was to map the world’s forests with the intent of creating a bank of tree seeds, a genetic library that could be used to help rebuild decimated forests. It’s akin to the Indigenous practice of thinking seven generations ahead.
A Visit with Renowned Tree Scientist Diana Beresford-Kroeger
Beresford-Kroeger has, like other equally visionary people (Jane Goodall comes immediately to mind), set her will and intelligence into fighting for good. For wholeness, beauty and peace.
Some of the passionate devotees of saving forests are the youngest humans. Beresford-Kroeger works with children. A section of the book details her visits to different forest schools, where she listens carefully to the concerns of the very young.
Our Green Heart comes at a critical moment. The current model of scientific research has run up against its own limitations. The book proposes that it is time for a new approach.
“I’m struck by the possibility that science has missed something important — namely that the planet, our home, contains a knowledge of self,” Beresford-Kroeger writes. “And that it supports, somehow, a march towards unity, which is one definition of the Divine.”
This march towards unity could not find a better a path than underneath a canopy of trees.
Source: thetyee.ca