In 1974 a crew drilling a borehole in the central Kalahari of Botswana struck something a drill should never meet: a living root, 68 metres beneath the surface. The tree that owned it, a shepherd's tree, reaches ten metres above ground on its best day and often stops at three. Below ground it drove a root through Kalahari sand to the depth of a twenty-storey building, down to water the surface never sees. No light reached that root. No eye watched it grow. The tree spent its life building the one part of itself nobody would admire, and that part carried it through every drought the desert sent.
Part One of this work closed on the seed: the library, sealed and dormant, waiting for a planter's hand. Jesus described what happens next, and his description opens with a loss: "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." The seed surrenders its husk, its store, and its separate life before the first root breaks through. Every stage that follows, from the root driving downward to the fruit dropping into a stranger's hand, runs on the same arithmetic. Fruit comes by subtraction.
I learned that arithmetic late. My trades paid for leaves: a byline, a broadcast, a headline, a launch, each one a green flash on the canopy, admired for a day and gone. Nobody pays a reporter for the root, and nobody pays a founder for the cut. Yet every fruit I ever tasted, from an orchard or from a life, grew on a plant that lost something first. Scripture reads the tree the same way, and it reads the tree without sentiment. The seed on stony ground springs up fast and scorches in the noon sun, and Matthew gives the reason: "because they had no root, they withered away." The vine meets the knife so that it bears more fruit. The thorns choke the shoot. The potter crushes the marred vessel and throws a new pot. The refiner sits beside the fire. Every image describes a loss, and every one of them ends in fruit.
01The root: a fight in the dark
Roots grow away from light. A shoot climbs toward the sun; a root turns its back on the sun and drives into ground that resists every millimetre. In 1996 a team of ecologists led by Josep Canadell gathered every published measurement of maximum rooting depth they could find. Across the whole record the global average came to 4.6 metres. Trees averaged seven. Farm crops reached about two. Desert plants, facing a dry season that lasts most of the year, averaged nine and a half metres, and the Kalahari held the record at 68. Depth, the survey showed, answers drought. A tree beside a river keeps shallow roots because the river brings the water. A tree in the sand goes down or dies.
Psalm 1 plants its blessed man as a tree by the rivers of water that "bringeth forth his fruit in his season." Jeremiah pictures the same tree and adds the mechanism. It spreads its roots out by the river, so when the heat comes its leaf stays green, and it keeps yielding fruit through the year of drought. Read the two passages as a hydrologist would. The river never cancels the need for roots. The river rewards the tree that sent the roots.
For a person, the root grows where no one applauds. It grows in the hour of reading before the house wakes and the prayer no one overhears. It grows in the four hundred words written and filed, and in the mother tongue spoken at the table while the school outside speaks another. Part One named those practices as the layers of the tree of words. Here they take a second job. They grow downward, through hard ground, in the dark, and they hold the tree upright when the drought that every life meets arrives on schedule.
02The knife: pruning
Jesus put the second cost in a single sentence, and John recorded it: "Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit." Mark the second clause. The fruitful branch meets the knife too. Horticulture confirms the sentence in every orchard on earth. Master gardeners at the University of California describe a fruit tree left alone. The upper branches shade the lower ones, fruiting wood dies in the shade, and the crop retreats to the tips beyond a ladder's reach. The tree sets so much fruit that each piece stays small. Then comes biennial bearing. One heavy crop drains the reserves that build next year's flower buds, and the tree rests through the following season with almost nothing to show. Extension agents in Arkansas call pruning a dwarfing process: it trims total yield and raises the size, colour, and quality of what stays on the branch.
Terence Robinson and his colleagues at Cornell pressed the point further in a 2014 study of Gala and Honeycrisp apples. They pruned trees to a target count of flower buds. The buds a grower removes in winter, they showed, help set the size of the apple a customer holds in October. The cut, made months ahead with nothing yet to show for it, shapes the fruit.
I know the knife from the handle side. In November 2014 I closed my Stabroek News column, Ways of Looking and Feeling, on its fifth anniversary. A reporter should never dress a sequence as a cause, and I will not claim that the work I do now grew from that cut. I can report the order of events. The column ended. Recording gave way to authoring. The fruit came later.
One warning belongs beside the blade. Pruning dwarfs a tree, and a grower who cuts too hard trades away the crop for a clean silhouette. A person can prune a life into a showpiece with no savour. The knife serves the fruit, never the shape.
03The borer: parasites that feed on you
In the summer of 2002, ash trees around Detroit and across the river in Windsor, Ontario, began dying from the crown down, and nobody could say why. The culprit measured about a centimetre and glinted green. The emerald ash borer, a beetle native to north-east Asia, rode across the Pacific, investigators suspect, in wooden packing material. The adult does little harm; it nibbles leaves. The larva does the killing. It hatches under the bark and feeds on the phloem, the thin layer that carries sugar from the leaves to the rest of the tree. Its S-shaped galleries cut the supply lines. From the street the tree looks healthy for a season or two. Then the canopy thins by a third or a half, and after three or four years of heavy infestation the tree stands dead. The United States Forest Service counts the toll in the tens of millions of ash trees, and the beetle now ranges across close to forty states and five Canadian provinces.
Mark's Gospel gives the human version in nine words: the thorns "grew up, and choked it, and it yielded no fruit." The parasite never announces itself. It feeds between the bark and the wood, on sugar meant for fruit, while the leaves stay green until the final season. Name yours. The debt that eats the first ten days of every month. The feed that eats the evening. The acquaintance who arrives to take and leaves before the bill. The habit that pays in ash. The grudge that draws sap for twenty years and never once flowers.
Cut with care, because not everything attached to a root steals sap. Fungi partner with the roots of most land plants and trade minerals for sugar, and a tree stripped of them struggles to feed itself. The test for a parasite comes from the Sermon on the Mount rather than from the saw: "Ye shall know them by their fruits." Whatever feeds on you and returns fruit, keep. Whatever feeds on you and returns only leaves, cut.
04The wind: lean and clean
In 1973 the plant physiologist Mordecai Jaffe rubbed the stems of young bean, cucumber, and barley plants for about ten seconds, once or twice a day. Within three minutes of the first stroke, the stems stopped lengthening. The rubbed plants grew shorter than untouched plants beside them, and when Jaffe stopped rubbing, the stems raced back to full growth. He named the effect thigmomorphogenesis: shape from touch. Thomas Andrew Knight recorded wind shaping trees as early as 1803; Jaffe gave the old observation its name. Later work on pines, firs, elms, and poplars measured the same bargain. A tree raised in wind grows shorter, with a thicker and stiffer trunk, a smaller crown, and less leaf area than a sheltered tree of the same age. The flexed tree gives up height and foliage and gains the strength to stand.
Lean means shorter than you planned. Clean means fewer leaves than you wanted. The sheltered tree grows tall and slender and looks the better of the two until the first real storm, when it lies across the road and the flexed tree stands. Even here the botanists record a price: wood formed under constant flexing may carry sap less well. Strength costs something. A person who intends to stand in public weather accepts the critic, the deadline, and the audience that answers back, and grows a trunk to match.