Thinking trees

As I understand it, thought processes and decision making in the human brain are based on complex chemical reactions. I have always been taught that this is what separates us from other living things, but it seems animals can learn and retain what they have learned. In other words, the lessons are coded and stored in their brains. What about plants? Having given this a good deal of thought, not research and analysis, just ordinary musing, has made me wonder if trees, for example have some sort of slow basic chemical memory that allows them to modify their behaviour. One assumes that plats have some sort of common ancestry in a single cell unit but evolved into the varieties we have today by a process similar to the way a virus mutates, only taking centuries, even millennia, instead of weeks.

How did the fir tree decide it was easier to survive and reproduce in climates with short summers by making its leaves narrow and needle like? How did trees decide to cast their leaves in autumn? To argue that it was due to simple chemical reactions in the trees metabolism is to admit that the tree trunk is a massive, very simple brain.

When one begins to think like this one begins to feel there may have been some logic in the old beliefs that every growing thing has a spirit and deserves protection. My Irish granny gave me strict warnings never to cut a hawthorn tree – the fairies lived in that, of course.

The subject intrigued me enough to write a piece, it has the basic elements of start middle end but turned out to be more in the style of a newspaper report. It’s included in the short story pages under Have a Good Day and, with other nonsense, in Bees in my Bonnet.