TREELOGY. Once touched, twice shy

Looking at a photo of the three of us on my phone, the writers KR Meera, Rajathi Salma and I, in front of the International Centre in Goa last December, I suddenly notice something that I hadn’t before. Our heads are touching; we’re trying hard to squeeze into the frame on Meera’s phone. But right above our heads is something that is in contrast to us — the tall and aged trees, their heads keeping a distance from their neighbour’s. It is late afternoon in the photo — the light in the sky has turned the silhouette of the thin and small leaves into something like a filigree, as if the barrier of the leaves to light were like the marble ventilators of a Mughal monument. My eyes return to the empty spaces between the treetops. They’ve begun resembling streets and underground sewers. It must be rush hour, and so the leaves and branches are not crossing over to the other side. I imagine traffic lights at this homecoming hour — no one, not even leaves, are allowed to cross these imagined streets in the sky.

The next photo — actually a series, variations, of the same photo — is also one that Meera sent me. It is of the tree-heads above us in the sky, the light so anaemic that it seems like it is a black-and-white photo. I feel touched when people send me photos of plant life saying it reminded them of me. Meera had said something similar, when she’d sent them to me. In all of them is the same story, the tree’s fear of contagion as it were. Why do the trees not want to touch each other?

Once home I begin investigating. I’m slightly apprehensive — trees couldn’t practise untouchability, could they? It turns out that this plant behaviour has an attractive, even poetic, name: ‘crown shyness’. I learn other names for it too — ‘canopy disengagement’, ‘canopy shyness’, ‘intercrown spacing’. I also discover a few other things... that it is a phenomenon that is more common between trees of the same species but is also prevalent between trees of different species.

No one quite seems to know why this happens. It began to be noticed and analysed scientifically only about a hundred years ago. Among the many hypotheses that try to explain this behaviour is one about ‘reciprocal pruning’. It is based on the observation that trees, particularly in very windy areas, suffer injuries as their branches collide with each other. That is why they avoid growing when they sense they are in close proximity to other branches, including branches of the same tree. To put it simplistically, then, they are keeping away from each other to avoid abrasion. Another hypothesis has to do with ‘mutual light sensing’. Again, to explain it in a simplistic manner, this is about sharing light wisely, knowing and recognising each other’s turf as it were, and therefore keeping away so as not to encroach on the other tree or branch’s space. In other words, it is a rejection of one-upmanship and the power that comes from territoriality.

In both these hypotheses, I find the recurring use of the word ‘shyness’ by scientists studying this behaviour very interesting. I had been socially — also, in a gendered way — conditioned to think of shyness as a human attribute. Here they are, using it for a living being that is outside the economy of emotions and social behaviour. Is this an anthropocentric bias alone? Another phrase that I find in the documentation of this research is ‘avoidance of kin’. This, too, makes me smile. Both ‘shyness’ and ‘avoidance of kin’ are attributes that could be used of people like myself, slightly asocial and anxious in the company of people. Is it possible that plants are like that too?

The reasons that scientists have attributed to crown shyness owe to physiological reasons — a sharing of resources, of light and space. Does human shyness come from the same space?

I looked at streams of photos of crown shyness. I’d expect to get bored, but quite strangely I was not. I know that had this been a series of human heads trying to avoid contact, I’d have stopped looking. I was amazed by the art — and related geometry — of shyness.

I had so long thought of shyness as a characteristic that was related to hiding, a protection of one’s self from the world. Avoidance of eye contact, of bodily contact, occasional blushing, a giving away as it were — these are its characteristics in the human. When I recently discovered that crown shyness is also possibly related to contagion, an avoidance of diseased or infected leaves and branches, I found myself running my finger through the blank spaces, visually beautiful spaces left empty by shy branches. I felt like this was the first time I had actually touched shyness.

Sumana Roy

Sumana Roy , author of How I Became a Tree, writes from Siliguri; Twitter: @SumanaSiliguri