Plant biologist Beronda Montgomery sat down to write what she thought would be a straightforward personal memoir with a side of botanical history. Then her Ph.D. lab research dragged her kicking and screaming into the world of social science, because apparently plants have been keeping receipts on human history this whole time.
Montgomery, author of "When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America's Black Botanical Legacy," is a botanist who studies how plants respond to light. But when she visited a former plantation site and saw a tree estimated to be 600 years old, she realized that tree had been standing there while people were enslaved on that land. And because she's a scientist, she started thinking about photosynthesis - the process where carbon dioxide and water become wood - and realized something profound: the ancestors' breath was literally captured in that tree.
"Their breath was captured in the tree, and now we're standing there with that same tree," Montgomery explained to Living on Earth host Steve Curwood. "Our breath had a chance to be captured together on a kind of recorded carbon archive." So basically, trees are the original hard drives, storing centuries of human exhales in their rings.
Montgomery draws on epigenetics - how environmental circumstances affect gene expression - to suggest that trees might carry physical markers of their traumatic past. "If there was a tree that was a hanging tree, that it remembers the weight of those bodies," she said, noting that in horticulture, bending a branch can change how it grows. "We think that it's outside the realm of possibility that a hanging tree would remember its strange fruit because we haven't had scientists who think about those parallels."
The book also highlights how enslaved Africans brought sophisticated agricultural knowledge to America that built entire industries. Rice cultivation thrived because West African women knew how to plant and irrigate it - so well that enslavers paid as much for these women as they did for young men. The entire commercial pecan industry traces back to an enslaved man named Antoine, who successfully grafted the Centennial variety. "There are many areas in agriculture - rice, pecans, tobacco - where we can point to the breakthroughs leading to commercial industries founded upon the knowledge of enslaved people," Montgomery said.
And Harriet Tubman? She was basically a tree whisperer. Tubman learned from her father that sycamore trees were nature's GPS - their distinctive peeling bark glows in moonlight, they grow near water (helpful for losing scent hounds), and their hollow trunks make excellent hiding spots. After emancipation, Tubman planted hundreds of fruit trees at her New York homestead and offered apples to visitors as "a sign of freedom that she could now do that."
Montgomery hopes readers will start paying attention to the trees around them - and maybe think about whose breath might be stored in them. "For me, this idea that my breath is captured by the tree has caused me to think about what it means to live a life worthy of that," she said. No pressure, but your local oak is literally keeping a carbon copy of your existence.