Thoreau’s “Radicle” Empiricism: Plant-Thinking in the Late Journal

While examining some oak seedlings in a neighbor's woodlot in October 1860, Henry David Thoreau noticed a field of dead saplings that had grown out of a single root system.Calculating its age, Thoreau remarks in his Journal (1837-61), "the root was prob 10 years old when the seedling first died down-& is now some 16 years old" (J 14:169). 1 When he later revised this account in The Dispersion of Seeds, Thoreau elaborates on the relationship between the roots and the neighboring trees: "In short, I think that this root may have been as old as the large oaks around it, or some twenty-five years old" (Faith 120).Thoreau had stumbled upon a remarkable phenomenon in arboreal communities: intertwined tree root systems support their neighbors with nutrients, water, and other necessary resources.Through his careful, empirical attention to these sprouting saplings, Thoreau grew increasingly aware of the networks that exist throughout the forest.This oak encounter mirrors Peter Wohlleben's discovery 150 years later in a German forest, where the forester stumbled across an aged stump still green with chlorophyll despite having no leaves.Since the tree had been harvested years earlier, he concludes the stump "must be getting assistance from neighboring trees, specifically from their roots" (2).Wohlleben benefits from more recent research by dendrologists like Suzanne Simard who have identified the mycorrhizal fungal networks connecting forest tree roots, but long before this discovery Thoreau approached a similar conclusion through his careful observation of the oak saplings. 2With a root-like observational and experimental practice, I claim, Thoreau performs a radically arboreal style of