我们终于知晓了树的秘密

“I am vertical/But I would rather be horizontal,” wrote Sylvia Plath, meditating on the consequences of a treelike existence. A team of researchers from the Vienna University of Technology recently announced another perspective on arboreal repose. Using sophisticated laser scanners they created images of trees during the night, when their metabolic processes slow down, and found that their branches had perceptibly drooped. They had “gone to sleep”, in the team’s words.

“I am vertical/But I would rather be horizontal（我是直立的/但我宁愿自己是水平的），”思考了像树一样的生存状态是什么样子之后，西尔维娅•普拉思(Sylvia Plath)这样写道。维也纳科技大学(Vienna University of Technology)的一个研究小组最近宣布了一种看待树木的睡眠的新角度。他们通过精密的激光扫描仪，对夜晚的树木成像，发现夜间新陈代谢过程放慢时，这些树木的的枝条明显下垂。用这个小组的话来说，这些树“睡着了”。

It is hardly a revelation: if your fluid pressure is reduced, you sag. What’s more interesting is the researchers’ language and their resorting to the ancient metaphor of “sleep”. Finding analogies between the physical forms and processes of trees and our own vertical life seems to be compulsive, a habit that goes back through Plath to the Romantic poets and beyond. We anthropomorphise them in a directly corporeal way. We talk of limbs and crowns and trunks. When a tree is felled we see a body, severed from its earthly roots and killed. Our empathy is understandable, and helps the world seem a more joined-up place, but it does a huge and damaging injustice to the tree world.

这很难让人感到惊讶：如果流体压力降低，形体就会松弛下来。更有趣的是研究者们的用语和他们对“睡眠”这个古老的比喻的运用。我们似乎总是情不自禁地将树的外在形态和生理过程与我们自身的直立生存状态相类比，这个习惯可以从普拉思一直回溯到浪漫主义诗人及其他人。我们用一种直接的形体化方式将它们拟人化。我们会说树枝（肢），树冠和树干。当一棵树被砍倒的时候，我们看到的是一具躯体被斩断、杀害，与地下的根系分离。我们的同情是可以理解的，并且有助于让这个世界显得更像一个整体，但这对树的世界是一种巨大的的不公和伤害。

Vegetal existence is defined by immobility. Plants are rooted to the spot, which means they cannot escape predators or pursue sexual partners. To compensate they have evolved a modular structure and a range of senses and communication channels which far exceeds our own, and which includes sensitivity to magnetism, static electricity, low frequency sound waves and ultraviolet light. New understanding of plants’ abilities (and intelligence: they can learn, remember and change their behaviour as a result) means that they are beginning to be afforded the status of autonomous beings.

植物性的存在是用不可移动性来定义的。植物扎根于一个地方，这意味着它们无法躲开掠食者或者追寻配偶。为了弥补这一劣势，它们进化出了一种模块化的结构和一系列远超我们人类的感官和沟通渠道，包括对磁力、静电、低频声波和紫外线的敏感性。我们对植物的能力（和智力：它们能够学习、记忆并从而改变自己的行为）的新理解意味着，它们开始被赋予拥有自主性的生物的身份。

Plants were regarded as no more than the furniture of the planet — useful, decorative, even indispensable; but essentially passive. Their growing existential stature means that we will have to rethink notions of “the natural order”.

过去，人们认为植物不过是地球上的家具——实用、好看，甚至不可或缺，但本质上依然是被动的。它们的存在身份的不断提高，意味着我们必须重新思考“自然秩序”的概念。

Even their reproductive strategies suggest inventiveness and opportunism, not rigid genetic scripts. A modular structure means plants have no irreplaceable organs and are usually able to regenerate even when nine-tenths of their living tissue has been destroyed. In the months after the Great Storm of October 1987, while doomsayers were announcing the ruination of the landscapes of southern England, I found a legion of trees unfazed by horizontality. Oaks and hornbeams were sending up new shoots all along their prostrate “bodies”; black poplars and beeches had aspiring new trunks climbing out of their upturned root-plates.

甚至连它们的繁殖策略都表现出创造力和投机性，而非严格依照基因的安排。模块化结构意味着植物没有不可替换的器官，即便90%的活体组织被破坏，也通常能够重生。在1987年10月大风暴(the Great Storm of October 1987)后，尽管灾难预言者宣布英格兰南部的地貌遭遇了灭顶之灾，我仍发现了很多在水平状态下也处变不惊的树。橡树和鹅耳枥倒伏的“躯体”上都抽出了新枝；黑杨和山毛榉朝上的根盘上都长出了欣欣向荣的新树干。

A few years ago I went to see what is probably the oldest tree in Europe, the Great Yew at Fortingall in Perthshire. Its previous immense size (20 people could have joined hands around it in the 18th century) and likely age (between 4,000 and 5,000 years) mean that it suffered in the past from souvenir hunters. The response of the authorities has been to put the hapless veteran in an iron cage, and to saw its branches back. This gives it the look of a specimen in a freak show, but has also emasculated it.

几年前，我造访了很可能是欧洲最古老的一棵树：苏格兰珀思郡(Perthshire)福廷格尔(Fortingall)的大紫杉(the Great Yew)。这棵树身巨大的古树（在18世纪需要20个人才能合抱，据估计有4000到5000岁树龄）在过去受到猎奇者的侵扰。当局的应对之法是把这棵倒霉的老树关进了铁笼子里，锯掉一些枝条。这不仅让它看起来像是怪物展上的展品，同时还让它失去了“男子气概”。

Last year, the Fortingall yew, a male tree, called on some ancient genes and transitioned, producing two female berries in the autumn.

这棵紫杉原本是一棵雄树，去年，它发动了一些古老的基因，转变了性别，在秋天长出了两个雌树才长的浆果。

We tend, trapped perhaps in the values of our own time and species, to regard trees as individuals. But they are inextricably social beings. Under the ground all trees are supported by symbiotic fungal partners. The tree supplies the fungus with sugars, the fungus extracts minerals from the soil and filters them into the trees’ roots. The complexity of this networking is only now being uncovered. It looks as if the fungal network connects all the trees in a wood regardless of species.

或许受限于我们所属时代和物种的价值观，我们倾向于把树当成个体。但它们是紧密相连的社会生物。在地下，所有的树都得到了共生的真菌伙伴的支持。这些树给真菌提供糖分，而真菌则从土壤中抽取矿物质并使其渗入树的根部。这种网络的复杂性直到最近才被揭示出来。看起来，真菌的网络不分种类地把一片树林里的所有树木连接了起来。

Using radioactive carbon markers, scientists have found that the fungi (or some distributed group intelligence) transfer food from evergreens to deciduous species in the winter and vice versa in the summer. The fungal network also acts as a conduit for sharing information about water availability and attacks by predatory insects, to the extent that it has been nicknamed “the wood-wide-web”.

通过放射性碳标记，科学家们发现，（堪称某种分布式群体智慧的）真菌会在冬季把食物从常绿树种传送到落叶树种，而在夏天则反过来。真菌网络还发挥着传播信息的作用，将有关水源和掠食性昆虫攻击的信息广而告之，以至于得到了“木维网”(wood-wide-web)的外号。

A similar chemical chattering (it is hard not to use human analogies) happens above ground. When the leaves of trees such as oaks and willows are attacked by insects, they are prompted to produce more bitter-tasting tannins. More remarkably, they also produce airborne pheromones which encourage the leaves on other parts of the tree to up their tannin before they too are attacked. Over the great stretches of evolutionary time, other species have learnt to hack these vaporous signals, so that in a seeming contradiction of selfish-gene theory, many individuals of several species benefit from the original tree’s defence mechanism.

在地上，类似的化学“交谈”（很难不用人类的行为来比喻）也在发生。如果橡树或者柳树的叶子被昆虫啃食，它们会分泌更多苦味的单宁酸。更不同寻常的是，它们也会产生通过空气传播的信息素，促进其他部位的叶子增加单宁酸含量，以免也遭到啃食。在进化的长河中，其他物种学会了截获这些气体信号，因此多个物种的许多个体，都能受益于最初遭到啃食的那棵树的防御机制——这似乎与“自私的基因”理论不符。

I cannot see how we can hope to find a place for ourselves in the Earth’s web of life without using the allusive power of our language to explore trees’ dialects of form and pattern and chemical messaging. But we must not smother their gift to us of different models of being alive. As Samuel Coleridge, great lover of plants, wrote that “everything has a life of its own, and that we are all One Life.”

如果不使用人类语言中暗喻的力量，去探索树木的形态、模式和化学信息传递的独有语言，我不知道人类如何能够在地球的生命网络中，为自己寻找一个立足之地。但我们绝不应扼杀它们对我们的馈赠，那就是不同的存在模式。就如钟爱植物的诗人塞缪尔•柯勒律治(Samuel Coleridge)所写的，“万物都有自己的生命，我们共有一个生命(everything has a life of its own, and that we are all One Life)。”