我們終於知曉了樹的祕密大綱
“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/但我寧願自己是水平的），”思考了像樹一樣的生存狀態是什麼樣子之後，西爾維婭•普拉思(Sylvia Plath)這樣寫道。維也納科技大學(Vienna University of Technology)的一個研究小組最近宣佈了一種看待樹木的睡眠的新角度。他們通過精密的激光掃描儀，對夜晚的樹木成像，發現夜間新陳代謝過程放慢時，這些樹木的的枝條明顯下垂。用這個小組的話來說，這些樹“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.
這很難讓人感到驚訝：如果流體壓力降低，形體就會鬆弛下來。更有趣的是研究者們的用語和他們對“睡眠”這個古老的比喻的運用。我們似乎總是情不自禁地將樹的外在形態和生理過程與我們自身的直立生存狀態相類比，這個習慣可以從普拉思一直回溯到浪漫主義詩人及其他人。我們用一種直接的形體化方式將它們擬人化。我們會說樹枝（肢），樹冠和樹幹。當一棵樹被砍倒的時候，我們看到的是一具軀體被斬斷、殺害，與地下的根系分離。我們的同情是可以理解的，並且有助於讓這個世界顯得更像一個整體，但這對樹的世界是一種巨大的的不公和傷害。
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動性來定義的。植物紮根於一個地方，這意味着它們無法躲開掠食者或者追尋配偶。爲了彌補這一劣勢，它們進化出了一種模塊化的結構和一系列遠超我們人類的感官和溝通渠道，包括對磁力、靜電、低頻聲波和紫外線的敏感性。我們對植物的能力（和智力：它們能夠學習、記憶並從而改變自己的行爲）的新理解意味着，它們開始被賦予擁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”.
過去，人們認爲植物不過是地球上的傢俱——實用、好看，甚至不可或缺，但本質上依然是被動的。它們的存在身份的不斷提高，意味着我們必須重新思考“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.
甚至連它們的繁殖策略都表現出創造力和投機性，而非嚴格依照基因的安排。模塊化結構意味着植物沒有不可替換的器官，即便90%的活體組織被破壞，也通常能夠重生。在1987年10月大風暴(the Great Storm of October 1987)後，儘管災難預言者宣佈英格蘭南部的地貌遭遇了滅頂之災，我仍發現了很多在水平狀態下也處變不驚的樹。橡樹和鵝耳櫪倒伏的“軀體”上都抽出了新枝；黑楊和山毛櫸朝上的根盤上都長出了欣欣向榮的新樹幹。
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.
幾年前，我造訪了很可能是歐洲最古老的一棵樹：蘇格蘭珀思郡(Perthshire)福廷格爾(Fortingall)的大紫杉(the Great Yew)。這棵樹身巨大的古樹（在18世紀需要20個人才能合抱，據估計有4000到5000歲樹齡）在過去受到獵奇者的侵擾。當局的應對之法是把這棵倒黴的老樹關進了鐵籠子裏，鋸掉一些枝條。這不僅讓它看起來像是怪物展上的展品，同時還讓它失去了“男子氣概”。
Last year, the Fortingall yew, a male tree, called on some ancient genes and transitioned, producing two female berries in the autumn.
這棵紫杉原本是一棵雄樹，去年，它發動了一些古老的基因，轉變了性別，在秋天長出了兩個雌樹才長的漿果。
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.
或許受限於我們所屬時代和物種的價值觀，我們傾向於把樹當成個體。但它們是緊密相連的社會生物。在地下，所有的樹都得到了共生的真菌夥伴的支持。這些樹給真菌提供糖分，而真菌則從土壤中抽取礦物質並使其滲入樹的根部。這種網絡的複雜性直到最近才被揭示出來。看起來，真菌的網絡不分種類地把一片樹林裏的所有樹木連接了起來。
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”.
通過放射性碳標記，科學家們發現，（堪稱某種分佈式羣體智慧的）真菌會在冬季把食物從常綠樹種傳送到落葉樹種，而在夏天則反過來。真菌網絡還發揮着傳播信息的作用，將有關水源和掠食性昆蟲攻擊的信息廣而告之，以至於得到了“木維網”(wood-wide-web)的外號。
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，類似的化學“交談”（很難不用人類的行爲來比喻）也在發生。如果橡樹或者柳樹的葉子被昆蟲啃食，它們會分泌更多苦味的單寧酸。更不同尋常的是，它們也會產生通過空氣傳播的信息素，促進其他部位的葉子增加單寧酸含量，以免也遭到啃食。在進化的長河中，其他物種學會了截獲這些氣體信號，因此多個物種的許多個體，都能受益於最初遭到啃食的那棵樹的防禦機制——這似乎與“自私的基因”理論不符。
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.”
如果不使用人類語言中暗喻的力量，去探索樹木的形態、模式和化學信息傳遞的獨有語言，我不知道人類如何能夠在地球的生命網絡中，爲自己尋找一個立足之地。但我們絕不應扼殺它們對我們的饋贈，那就是不同的存在模式。就如鍾愛植物的詩人塞繆爾•柯勒律治(Samuel Coleridge)所寫的，“萬物都有自己的生命，我們共有一個生命(everything has a life of its own, and that we are all One Life)。”
