Living in the Ground
2021

I’ve long been fascinated by trees and in particular curious about their roots.  When I’m out hiking a tipped over tree is always a magnet, with its tangle of roots exposed, wrapped around rocks, revealing an inner life, or under life, that we normally can’t see.

When we think of a tree we think:  trunk, branches, leaves.  This is really only half of the tree, though the root structure may be smaller than the crown.  There used to be an idea that a tree’s roots mirrored its canopy of branches and leaves, but over time it’s been found that often tree roots are quite shallow, depending  on the rockiness of the soil, and they will often spread more widely that they dive deeply.  So how do trees stand up?  Part of the answer is that the roots grow in response to the topography, and if there is a slope the downhill roots will buttress the tree to keep it from falling downhill, and the uphill roots will tether it like guy wires (‘guy roots’).  Roots will grow to stabilize a tree according to the prevailing winds, also.

In this series, I imagined what it might feel like to grow roots down into the ground. It’s not like legs, at all – it’s something else entirely.  When I say ‘imagine’ I mean somatically, not visually.