Seeds Planted in Tower Time
by Genevieve Williams
Twenty years ago I lopped blackberry canes, dug up root balls, yanked out English ivy mats, dug drainage ditches, and planted trees.
This was the West Duwamish Greenbelt, over 500 acres of contiguous forest between Seattle’s Duwamish River and the multiple neighborhoods that make up West Seattle. Despite logging, development, and various incursions ranging from the industrial to the recreational, the forest persisted. Forests do, whether humans intervene or not. But we often have our own ideas about what a forest should look like, and purposes for restoration beyond the health and vitality of the forest itself. The Greenbelt, for instance, is also a steep slope shoring up the eastern edge of West Seattle. Without the trees, the homeowners at the top of the ridge might suddenly find themselves on the riverfront.
Twenty years ago, I was finishing up graduate school at the University of Washington. 9/11 was four years in the past and the resulting U.S. war in Iraq had been going on since 2003. Somehow, President George W. Bush began a second term and Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Israel withdrew from Gaza and the terms ransomware, microblogging, truther, and sexting entered common parlance.
I planted trees.
After a wildfire, forests in the Pacific Northwest have their own way of regenerating. Where I live it is widely known that the Douglas fir, ponderosa pine, and western larch thrive in wildfire environments; the thick bark of mature trees insulates them from the flames, and in the subsequent relative absence of competition from other trees, their seeds can spread more readily. Some tree species germinate as the result of wildfire, the heat or smoke signaling that conditions are now right—greater sunlight, less competition—to sprout. Fire is both destructive and regenerative.
Today I am building a home on land that for many decades has been clearcut and replanted. The aftereffects of logging are in some ways similar to fire; fast-growing trees such as cottonwood and alder shoot upwards so fast you can almost hear them growing, while the stinging nettle and foxglove do the same in any sunny verge they can find. Himalayan blackberry, brought to North America by an enthusiastic botanist who also got its place of origin wrong, shoots up its canes in sunny verges and, sometimes, climbs trees. The madrona trees, ignored by the loggers, survive and thrive according to their own peculiar logic: notoriously difficult to establish on purpose, they seed themselves in what seem the poorest and unlikeliest of soils, and then thrive.
Today, I am retired from the career that I went to graduate school for. The Russo-Ukrainian War has been ongoing for over ten years. Somehow, Donald Trump has begun a second term and flooding in Texas has killed over 130 people. Israel began bombing Gaza after October 7, 2023 and at least 58,000 people there have died. I am too old to know what the new words are, or to believe that planting trees will fix any of this.
And still, my husband, my friends and I planted 400 trees on the land where our house is being built: two hundred Douglas fir (not actually a fir), one hundred Western redcedar (not actually a cedar), one hundred white pine (actually a pine). Today, some of their crowns poke out of the sea of blackberry that has defied our efforts to contain it. Ecosystems create themselves, whatever our efforts. Though not yet completed, our house already hosts a swallows’ nest and several paper wasp colonies. Like a tree, it is already an ecosystem.
Thirty years ago a friend put Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower into my hands. The book’s title comes, of course, from the Biblical verse. In the parable, some seeds flourish into new growth; others never so much as sprout, depending on the soil in which they’re planted. The sower, like a tree, keeps scattering the seed, in hopes of the ones that grow. Butler’s novel itself is now a classic, one cited as inspiration by new generations of authors, by creators in every medium; it has been adapted into an opera and a graphic novel. In it, the protagonist’s home is destroyed by fire, and she and her companions, like seeds, must scatter in search of new soil in which to take root. Not every seed survives, and not every seed that survives thrives. All that is necessary is that there be enough.
In the Tarot deck, the card of disaster is not Death, but the Tower, quintessentially rendered as a tower struck by lightning, licked by flame, with hapless people falling bodily into the abyss all around. Tower Time is a time of disaster, when catastrophe overtakes all, and fortresses burn.
A tree might be a tower, from a certain point of view. A fortress, even, a haven for its own living and the other beings that live upon it, from mushroom to magpie. The tallest, oldest trees in Northwest forests are big enough that you could put a spiral staircase inside them and climb to the very top. But even the biggest, oldest, most resilient trees fall eventually.
Somewhere, it is always Tower Time; trees fall in the forest whether or not anyone is there to hear them, and burn or survive wildfires whether or not anyone wants them to. I say this not to be dismissive of tragedy. If anything, it is all the more reason to plant seeds. These might be literal trees, like the firs and the redcedars and the pines. It might be cultivating relationships with other humans, or with other beings who are not human. It might be writing down a combination of words that have never occurred together before in the universe, not even (or is that especially) since the invention of ChatGPT. It might be Venmoing twenty dollars to a total stranger because that’s what they need to keep their phone turned on.
Seven years from now, twenty years from now, thirty years from now, some of those trees will have grown. Or not. The seed, as the parable says, is not a guarantee of flourishing. But if no seeds are planted, then after the Tower’s collapse will come nothing at all.
Genevieve Williams (she/her) is a writer, wildlife tracker, musician, and librarian rooting into the forests of the Pacific Northwest.
