Are the trees in your landscape boys or girls?
This may not be a question you've asked yourself. But perhaps you should:
When planting trees, not appreciating different tree genders can lead to many unwanted problems.
This is the opening of a web page, one of many the "Religion of Trees" class found doing a collective internet trawl today on the "gender(ing) of trees." It's representative in its unwillingness to realize that the boy/girl framework makes sense of as good as no trees.
It duly lists the kinds of tree sexual system - cosexual, monoecious, dioecious and polygamous - and gives examples. (The red maples in our courtyard are polygamous.) It even reveals that species with separate "male" and "female" trees - dioecious - are very rare.
In the Eastern U.S., some 40% of the trees are monoecious, 30 percent are cosexual, 20% are dioecious and 10% are polygamous. Around the globe, about 75% of all trees are cosexual, 10% monoecious, 10% polygamous and 5% dioecious.
But it can't quit the model from animal reproduction it warns against.
For most trees, sexual behavior is not strictly male or female. Trees effectively reproduce using different combinations of functional sexual parts distributed in different types of flowers and cones.
The strict gender concepts of pure male and pure female we understand with animals must be flexible when applied to trees.
"Flexible"? Or perhaps its final lines sneakily invite us to discover the queerness of nature all around us?
So inspect your trees and take an inventory. Do you have more boys or girls in your landscape?
Queerness isn't unthinkable for most in our class, though most had no idea that trees were quite so nonbinary in quite so many ways. I had the students divide into groups, each charged with reading two short pieces and surfing the web for more, and then drafting a brief response. The most spirited, riffing on Katriona Sandilands' ode to the fluidly dioecious white mulberry, offered a tribute:
you are delicious and so generous. i don’t care how you reproduce. you are an intersectional wonder and share your goods with us all. thank you for your labor and your kindness. you are a home to so much, and fuel so many industries both in human economy and life of other species. your sex changing depending on humidity and light is the coolest shit i’ve ever heard. so maleable and wonderful. no wonder you have been so resilient in our world. love you always
lang religion of trees
xoxo
ps you are delicious
