Dear Human,

HELLO. I am writing to you because a fellow human of yours, Chardin of Preservation Arborists, asked me to introduce myself: I’m a TREE. I’m in a good mood. Hope you are, too. All summer I ate sunshine for breakfast!

When sunlight nuzzles my leaves I feel the squeeze — the turgor or water pressure built up in my leaf cells — and then a burst. Rainbow is a good word you have for a great feeling. My leaves capture energy from the sunshine and bam: a chemical reaction begins. My cells get excited, open up, and digest the reaction, and then all that energy transforms into delicious starches and oxygen I give back to you.

Oxygen! I know you need it and I just love giving that to you. And I eat carbon dioxide, too. I like it in the way you like pancakes. I will totally eat that for you.

But I’m not all unselfish AS I HAVE BEEN PORTRAYED IN SOME BOOKS FOR CHILDREN. I use my breakfasts for myself. To make myself strong so I can grow and survive and yes, help others, too. Trees need help. Times are stressful! But I don’t want to talk about that right now. 

I want to talk about what happens after my summer breakfasts! I send some of my breakfast down through my trunk into my roots.  

Down in the soil I share with the tiny little beings! It’s fun down there and very busy and tangled like one of your human cities where there’s all sorts of trading and talking and making and eating going on. I make friends! I know, it’s weird. My roots make friends by giving away some food and in return my underground friends give me the water I need. Bacteria, protists, nematodes: you humans have a lot of words for my friends in the soil and there are too many words for this letter. (Please help the small humans around you become scientists that understand all this because that would be so friendly to us! We need more friends to understand us!)

And we also need your help right now! “We” as in me and all the trees and what you call mycorrhizal fungi that live in the soil. Yes, this is a marketing letter from your trees! We need marketing, too, I guess, even though we know you know that you need us to live. WHY DO SOME PEOPLE FORGET THIS?! Let’s keep helping each other live! Let’s make some healthy soil for all our little underground friends; they don’t know how to write marketing letters. Healthy soil is so good! 

Thank you and keep being good!!!

Love and oxygen,

The Tree (with the help of Chardin Detrich)

Human and Preservation Arborist Jamie with newly and correctly planted tree.