Thank you James! You have made me realise I am not crazy. As your video link clearly demonstrates, it is perfectly possible for trees to make music – or more precisely it is perfectly possibly to find music encoded within a tree:

https://player.vimeo.com/api/player.js

I have been thinking about my own tree for some time. It has been worrying me. Only the other day I wrote this:

It’s spring. The crab apple and the cherry blossom are sherbeting into life. The velveteen magnolia pods are splitting open to reveal a peep of pink. And my fruit tree is looking at me in a funny way.
I paid a stoner called Tristram to prune all my trees back in September and I felt he’d done a good job. He seemed like the kind of hippy who might have a ‘feel’ for how best to mutilate a tree, even if he was doing it through the mystic fug of sensimilia. He told me he was getting his shit together because his partner was 7-months pregnant and he wanted to take his responsibilities as a dad seriously. I think this meant he wasn’t going to forget to invoice me like the last time he’d been round. He didn’t even remember having been at my house before.

Anyway, the fruit tree has clearly not enjoyed its haircut by Tristram the father-to-be. I’d guess that pretty much every son of a certain age has a story about being taken to the barbers by dad and it never ends well – babyish curls reduced to a bowl cut, the rebellious teen fringe shawn away, grunge bedhead replaced by short back and sides.

So maybe the tree is sulking, refusing to blossom, raising its rough stumps in protest towards me; ruining the view, despoiling my quiet washing-up time, that calm 15 minutes when I slop the suds over pots and pans, screen out the warbling radio and pretend to be lost in a world of good intentions, a world of projects I will deliver – oh the words I will write, the great works I will lend my name to.

But now I have the tree looking back at me through the window. Not sulkily really, but definitely pregnant with some kind of emotion, like it has something to say to me, some accusation to make or a secret to share. The tree is trying to tell me something.

So now, James, I’m recalling the IBM reed-beds in Yorktown Heights that were once used as a vegetable memory store. (Did I dream that up? I don’t think so. I think I remember writing about it in Which Computer? in about 1992.)

The principle is fairly simply – a plant’s cell structure can change according to how you feed it, how you water it, where you locate it etc. Match a data set to a particular moment in a plant’s life cycle and you have basically encoded a message into a plant by associating it with a particular cell structure. (Are you following me?) It makes sense then that by ‘growing’ the plant back to a particular state in its life – or by growing a replica plant to the same state – one might be able to retrieve any data that had been encoded into said plant.

So maybe trees don’t just have music within them, James. (After all what is music but a way of encoding emotion, memory, time…?) Perhaps the trees have DATA.  Yes, that sexy DATA word. Or maybe the music that is playing in that video was ‘planted’ there by another human being some time ago as some kind of record about how she or he (or the tree) was feeling at the time. Perhaps the music itself is a message. Music often is.

Sounds a bits nuts, I agree. But get this. It is perfectly possible to work out what’s going on inside a tree. I have been in contact with an Israeli company, for example, that can supply me with phytomonitoring equipment – tools for measuring sap flow, branch girth, leaf growth, photosynthesis rates, fruit size etc. And in this way I could start to get the measure of my tree, understand how it is emerging from its cold-stare winter look to something more shrouded and fulsome and givin

As it sprouts its blossom and allows its bark to breathe, I’ll discover if the data locked inside it makes any kind of sense. The tree and its sensors can start to speak to me. And I’ll have my reason for why the tree looks at me in that funny way.

So thanks, James, you have started something. I’ll report back when the sensors arrive.