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“A woman sits on the ground, leaning against a pine. It’s bark presses hard against her back, as hard as life. It’s needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. The tree is saying things, in words before words.”
I’m Betty Martin with Martin’s Must Reads and those are some opening lines from Richard Powers’ novel
The Overstory, a sweeping novel about nine people and their relationships to trees and their survival.
There’s Nicholas Hoel whose grandfather planted a chestnut tree in the middle of his farm and started a three generation tradition of photographing it each month. There’s Douglas Pavlicek, a decorated soldier who makes it his mission to plant trees in the fashion of Johnny Appleseed. There’s Patricia Westerford, a tree scientist who discovers that trees communicate with each other and writes a treatise that changes how many think about trees.