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A 600-year-old oak tree at a former South Carolina plantation first got award-winning plant biologist and author Beronda L. Montgomery (Lessons From Plants) thinking about writing a book that explores the role of trees in Black history and culture.
In When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America’s Black Botanical Legacy, Montgomery writes that as she gazed up at the 60-foot tree’s enormous branches, she “mulled over the reality that not only had this tree shared the same time and place with our enslaved ancestors, but their exhalations in moments of weariness, bleakness, and even times of hope for better had directly supported its growth.”
Such interplay between humans and trees is a poignant refrain that echoes through When Trees Testify. The author delves into the fascinating particulars of seven trees—pecan, sycamore, willow, poplar, mulberry, oak and apple—and the cotton shrub. She draws on her science background to detail the intricacies of root systems, growth patterns and life cycles, and shares myriad revelatory details. For example, the pecans we enjoy today became a viable product thanks to plant-grafting experiments done in the 1800s by an enslaved Louisiana man named Antoine. She notes that poplar trees were often used in lynchings, and sycamores’ hollowed-out trunks frequently served as “effective hiding place[s] of individuals seeking liberation from their lives of enslavement.”
Montgomery also shares moving memories of growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas, from her joy at hiding underneath a weeping willow to her sorrow at wondering if her grandfather was among those who hid in the woods to escape the white insurrectionist-led 1919 Elaine Massacre. At once a scientist, historian and memoirist, Montgomery argues that trees “stand to testify to the lives of countless Black Americans . . . testimonies we need to hear and honor, and with which we need to fully reckon.” When Trees Testify is a meditative, illuminating read for fans of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Imani Perry’s Black in Blues.