A Tree’s Reflections
The longer I spend with trees, the more I recognize something I did not expect to find. They are not so different from us.
I came across a series of posts recently that documented why so many young trees today are failing. Wind events uprooting orchards. Young farm-grown trees snapping where old forest trees hold. Agroforestry belts collapsing under conditions they were supposedly designed to survive. The research pointed at modern growing practices: constant surface irrigation, early and aggressive pruning, chemical dependency, and the widespread replacement of resilient local species with fast-growing commercial varieties bred for output, not longevity.
None of it surprised me. We have been watching the same pattern in Haiti for years.
A tree can grow fast and still grow weak. And sometimes what looks like care is actually the slow creation of dependency.
When trees are watered daily at the surface, the roots have no reason to search deeper. They stay close to comfort, close to certainty, close to wherever the moisture is easiest to reach. And that works, until it doesn’t. Until drought comes, or a storm, or a season that asks more of the tree than the shallow soil can offer. The roots have nowhere to go. The tree has no relationship with the ground beneath it.
Nature works differently. In a forest, water moves slowly. Leaves fall and become mulch. The soil stays cooler and holds moisture longer. Roots follow water downward into the earth over time. Wind moves through the canopy and teaches flexibility. Dry seasons teach conservation. Storms teach anchoring. The tree is shaped by its environment, and that shaping is not cruelty. It is formation.
Stress, in the right amount, is not damage. It is information.
This is something we have had to sit with at Grown in Haiti, because the instinct when you care about something is to protect it from every difficulty. To water it when it looks dry. To prune it into a manageable shape. To give it everything it needs right now. But resilience cannot be installed after the fact. It develops from the beginning, through the accumulated experience of navigating real conditions. A tree that has never needed to search for water will not know how when the water stops coming. A tree that has never felt wind load will not know how to distribute that force through its trunk and roots when a storm arrives.
You cannot shortcut that kind of knowing.
The more time I spend working with trees, the more I find myself relating to them in a way that feels personal. I think about how I would want to be grown, if someone were tending to my development. I would want the freedom to learn from my own mistakes. I would want the space to express something true about who I am, instead of being constantly shaped into whatever form someone else had in mind. I would want to struggle sometimes, without being controlled every time life became uncomfortable. And I would want real care too. Not force. Not management. The kind of presence that supports you without removing your capacity to become strong.
That is how I try to grow trees.
I allow them to respond to the environment around them. I allow wind to build their trunks. I allow roots to search deeper when the dry season comes. I allow individual trees to lean, stretch, branch out differently, grow into their own character instead of being forced into identical shapes. I allow them to show me what they are actually capable of becoming.
But that is not the same as abandonment.
There is a real difference between neglect and deliberate, attentive non-interference. When a tree is newly planted and the soil is harsh, it may still need shade. When a young sapling is under stress beyond what is formative, it needs water carried by hand. When the ground has been degraded, it needs mulch and organic matter and protection before anything else can take root. The goal is not to make things hard. The goal is to help the tree build a genuine relationship with the place it is growing, rather than a dependency on our intervention.
That shift changes everything about how you plant.
You begin thinking less about controlling the outcome and more about preparing the conditions. You plant windbreaks before the wind comes. You mulch before the dry season. You water slowly and deeply so roots are pulled downward, not held at the surface. You choose species with a real relationship to local soil, seasonal rainfall, and temperature, rather than chasing whatever variety is trending or producing fastest. You observe before you reach for a tool.
And over time, something becomes clear. The strongest systems almost always grow slower in the beginning. The trees that look unremarkable in their first two years are often the ones still standing when the ones that raced upward have fallen.
This is not a new understanding. Farmers across Haiti, across the Caribbean, across much of the world, held this knowledge long before industrial agriculture began optimizing for speed and uniformity and output above everything else. Traditional growing practices worked with seasonal rhythms, local species, mixed planting, organic matter, and careful observation of the land itself. Not because people had scientific language for what they were doing. But because they were paying close attention, and they trusted what the land was showing them.
Part of what regenerative agriculture actually asks of us is that we recover that attention. Not invent entirely new relationships with the earth, but remember healthier ones. The land does not only need planting. It needs relationship. It needs observation. It needs patience.
A tree that develops deep roots in living soil becomes more than productive. It becomes stable. Adaptive. Resilient. Present in the landscape in a way that a fast-grown, shallow-rooted specimen simply cannot be.
The same, I think, may be true for us.
