For example, trees undergoing stress form tiny bubbles inside their trunks creating ultrasonic vibrations.
We can hear leaves rustle, branches creak and squeak in the wind, but trees make more sounds that are inaudible to the human ear but discernible by other beings. This natural language exists beyond our understanding of communication because trees “speak” in frequencies that humans can’t perceive. They show how trees talk to each other using mycorrhizal fungi, an underground hyphal network. Kimmerer and other scientists like Suzanne Simard and Toby Kiers study tree communities, inspiring ways for us to learn from-and live with-the natural world. Written on bark, it is no coincidence that some of the first forms of writing used trees. I hope the book takes readers on a journey-from prehistoric cave paintings to creation myths, from Tree Clocks in Mongolia and forest fragments in the Amazon to Emerson’s language of fossil poetry, from Eduardo Kohn’s anthropology beyond the human to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s call for a new grammar of animacy-unearthing a grove of beautiful stories along the way.
#OGHAM FEWS FOUND ON TREE BRANCHES ARCHIVE#
The Language of Trees is an archive of human knowledge filtered through many branches of thought. At the heart of these books is the Tree Alphabet, a living alphabet that can be planted, allowing us to seed stories, watch them sprout and grow. I’m thrilled to have an opportunity to remake About Trees as The Language of Trees. I used the font to make the book About Trees, which was published as a limited-edition artists’ book by Broken Dimanche Press in 2015. This font, the first of several, lets us type with Trees, translating our letters into trees, words into woods and stories into forests. These new “characters” were converted into a font: a typeface that I call Trees. I created a Tree Alphabet-a new ABC-by taking each of the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet and creating a corresponding tree drawing. What if we plant living time capsules with secret messages written to our future selves? Why not make our words matter by planting them? We could seed secret messages of resistance, plant blooming poems and cultivate landscapes of renewal. Words are alive, emerging from and evolving with culture. Our capacity to produce language is innate, like a trees’ ability to produce leaves.
Journeying from the heartwood of ancient Ogham to today’s emojis, Aengus Woods introduces us to the strangeness of an alphabet of trees. This ancient writing was read from the ground up-each character sprouting from a central line, like branches on a tree. The characters were called feda, “trees,” or nin, “forking branches,” due to their shapes. Ireland’s medieval Ogham, sometimes called a “tree alphabet,” used trees for letters. We had to learn in secret “hedge schools.” Townlands contain Cill, Irish for “cell” or “church,” demonstrating how intimately entwined our very cells-selves are with the Catholic church! In the first experiment in colonization, our language was beaten out of us. Dair means “Oak” and is found in many placenames around Ireland. Irish placenames are derived from hidden histories or trees that used to grow there, ghost forests. The Irish landscape I grew up in is riddled with stone walls and stories, seventy thousand placenames and countless fairy trees.
I’ve always felt like a plant-person, moss and lichen covered the land a part of me and me of it.
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