A man told me a tree was going to fall over.

I asked him how he knew.

"The tree told me," he said.

"You're crazy," I thought.

And then the tree fell over.

The incident

On December 30, 2014, Floyd Leverton arrived at our property in Malibu, California. He was there to look at our trees, which have grown where they liked, largely unchecked, for who knows how long. A Canary Island palm, royal palms, myoporum, pomegranates, California pepper, bananas, acacias, two olive trees, a rogue pine and numerous others of various shapes and sizes are scattered all over our three acres, which a friend calls “the forest.” But as with much of coastal California, eucalyptus are the dominant residents, with a tall stand of them at the bottom of the property and plenty more along the borders.

We’d had windstorms that autumn and my mother-in-law was concerned that things might start falling. I’d called an arborist, the arborist had suggested Floyd as a tree trimmer, and so here he was—tank top, tattoo, blue fingernails and all. “He’s eccentric,” the arborist had said, “but I think you’ll like him.” We didn’t care what he looked like, we just wanted someone who could handle the job, and she’d also said that Floyd was one of the best in the state, if not the country. More than that, she added, “he’s not a butcher. He’s considerate,” and that was important to us.

It was about 4pm, and we could feel the wind picking up. My mother- in-law was asking Floyd various questions about the trees, his opinion on the state of the land, when work might start and so on. Then she asked if he thought any of our trees would fall down soon, “Like that one, for example,” she said, casually gesturing toward a tall eucalyptus nearby. “Oh I guess that’s a silly question,” she quickly added. “There’s no way you could know that. I mean, it’s not like you can talk to the trees and ask them if they’re going to fall down.”

And then Floyd said it: “Actually, I can.” 

Floyd asked if he could have permission to speak to the tree. “Sure,” my mother-in-law said, smiling and shooting me a “this should be interesting” glance, which I returned with my own East Coast smirk. My mother-in-law is a California girl, like my wife, but even she didn’t seem to be buying it, standing there with her arms crossed and a look that seemed to say, “We’ll enjoy the show and then we’ll move on.”

Floyd walked over to the tree, which was more than two stories tall and which had lived next to the house for more than 40 years, and he just stood there, about 20 feet away from us. He put his hand on his chin at one point, cocked his head to the side and he might have gestured with his hands a few times, as if he and the tree were having a conversation over lunch. If I’d come across him in a city park I’d have thought, “Wacko. Just another day in LA.”

After five minutes or so Floyd walked back over to tell us what he’d learned, and it went something like this: “This tree is very happy that it had a chance to talk with someone. It’s been in distress for a long time, for many years. It’s been doing its best to hold itself up, but it’s about to fall. It wants you to know that it has enjoyed being here and it really likes your family. It also wants you to know that it doesn’t want to hurt anyone or damage any property. Now that it has told you this it says it feels unburdened and it’s going to let go. Out of all of the trees on your property, I wouldn’t let my grandson play under this one or anywhere near it. This tree is going to fall at any moment, maybe tonight.”

We thanked Floyd for his time, he climbed into his pickup truck and left.

Less than eight hours later, the tree fell down.

When I looked out our front door in the morning, over the deck that had been pushed into the air by the roots of the tree when it fell, I couldn’t see my car and I assumed that it had been flattened. I’d parked it under the tree, as usual, and I hadn’t moved it—that’s how seriously I had taken Floyd.  After walking into the tree’s canopy, which now covered my vehicle, I discovered something amazing: the tree had only grazed the back of my SUV, sheered off the rear windshield wiper and put a half-inch ding in my bumper. A tree with a trunk so big I could just get my arms around it had missed—avoided?—my car by less than an inch. I drove out of the tree with the glass roof of my vehicle, like the rest of it, intact.

Looking at the downed eucalyptus I felt bad for it. How long it had stood there, and it said that it had been struggling. But wait a minute... “It said.” Then I felt confused. There were even the beginnings of anger when my journalistic instincts went to the dark side and I questioned whether the tree had told Floyd it was going to fall down—or whether Floyd had told the tree to fall down. But that was crazy, questioning his ability to control trees, which means that I had already accepted that he could communicate with them. But couldn’t he? Could he? 

The Tree Man

“There are a lot of things that the eye doesn’t see that are actually taking place, that are real,” Floyd tells me in UCLA’s botanical gardens, more than a year after the tree fell.

“I’ve been blessed and fortunate enough to allow myself to step into some real stuff of being able to actually listen to trees and to do a communication with them and hear what they have to say. I ask them questions, and most of the time I will get some answers, like that day I was at your place.”

It wasn’t always like this. Floyd says he had his awakening, as he calls it, five or six years ago, around the time he turned 60. An event with a tree on a client’s property led him to question everything he thought he knew.

“I was freaked out and I thought that there was something invisible going on that had something to do with other dimensions,” he says. “I had studied a little quantum physics at the time, string theory, and I found a grad student and he and I would meet and talk, but I wasn’t getting anywhere.” 

A contact suggested Floyd go to a meditation group, and though he says he was skeptical he also felt he needed answers, so he went. “It was very difficult for me because I’m very active and driven, and at the time it was that I’m a rock climber, I’m a master SCUBA diver, I ride motorcycles, I have my rifles that I practice with, my guns. I was a very aggressive male and I would do my marital arts, and then someone at the meditation group says ‘You should go see a psychic.’ I’d never seen one. I thought ‘OK maybe this guy will have something.’”

His experience with the psychic left him even more confounded, he says, but still curious, and so he continued on his path, which then led to a Native American man. 

“He said, ‘My father is an elder, a medicine man, and he’s been waiting for you.’ His father, an elder Apache, adopted me. He said ‘I’m adopting you, you’re my son.’ And I started to be taught.

"This process of listening to trees, it’s not imaginary ‘fa la la’ stuff, it’s real...

I began to relax myself and to settle in and to trust and to listen to the voice or the voices and realize that it’s not my thoughts, it’s whispers from tree spirits—there are tree spirits, there are other spirits around us that are overlapping and interweaving simultaneously on this planet. And so I began to allow myself to believe that stuff like this is possible, and as I allowed myself to believe I shifted away from my locked-in male aggressive attitude and belief system that had served me so well for the beginning of my 60 years... And I began to look at these healers and these energy workers and these medicine men and women, and see that when they no longer take ownership for being judgmental, when they no longer take ownership for being afraid, for being aggressive or angry, when they stand neutral and ask, then things begin to happen and things unfold and truths are expressed and shown. And so that’s where my communication, my sensitivities, have increased to the point where it happened that day when I went out with you guys to take a look and do the estimate on your eucalyptus.” 

The Artist 

“What I’m not is a traditional musician," Mileece told VICE’s Motherboard in 2013. In her 20s, the English sound designer was the resident artist at the London School of Economics, forwarding interactions that sought to give a voice to plants, translating their naturally occurring electrical currents into sound via a sophisticated software and hardware setup of her own design.

“The way that it works is that you have a plant and you put an electrode on it, which can be used to conduct that current coming off the leaf, and then it goes into an amplifier and then the amplifier gets turned into binary code and then the software takes that data and animates sound.”

Her work has been featured in installations and performances at such venues as MoMA in New York, the Migros Museum in Zurich, and many others around the world. Key to her efforts, she told me, is dispelling the notion of a natural hierarchy of communication, which we’re taught to embrace from a very young age.

“We’re always discovering new things that are going on with life that we have assumed is at a low level,” she says. “It’s a sad fact, why we have the skepticism, and also it becomes that we become incredulous of communication that reaches into those realms we can’t easily perceive but which touch on things that science says cannot be realizable. We have been taught to have dominion over the Earth, and we’ve been taught ‘survival of the fittest,’ and we’ve been taught these things that give us this character, and in that context we have a hard time allowing ourselves to interface or to have some kind of intelligent exchange with other life forms. We’re always so surprised when it turns out they’re much smarter than we thought. It’s not a trend that we’ve discovered that life is less intelligent. That has never happened. We’ve never thought something was more intelligent and then found out that it was stupid—except for humans. We should look at that, that trend of experiencing the world and becoming more and more able to qualify and to quantify intelligence.”

In the 2013 interview, Mileece laid out her long-held view on plants and intelligence, a view that is becoming more mainstream:

“I do think plants are sentient. I know they’re sentient. No one in science can answer to you what consciousness is. No one. But what we do is, we like to say consciousness is derived from having a central processing unit, as in ‘the brain,’ which plants do not have. But they do have conglomerations of tiny cells that function like brains, because they can take information, they can assess information, and then they can make decisions about that information and they can update it in real time.”

She’s right. 

The Scientists

“It was just a massive mat of intertwining exposed roots that you could walk across and never fall through,” said Suzanne Simard, speaking to National Public Radio’s Radiolab in a segment called From Tree to Shining Tree, about the time she dug a hole to help the family dog out of a bind and exposed an extensive root network.

The experience prompted Simard, then working in the timber industry, to consider how trees interacted.

“When I came onto the scene in the 1980s as a forester we were into industrial large-scale clearcutting in western Canada,” she told NPR, explaining that timber companies would clearcut huge patches of forest, then re-plant the area with new trees.

“My job was to track how these new plantations would grow.” She began to notice that differing tree species weren’t behaving as expected: they weren’t shading each other out for sunlight or fighting over resources. Instead, some kind of symbiotic relationship was at play, which she first noticed in the case of a Birch tree and a Fir tree. If she took out the Birch, “the Douglas Fir became diseased and died,” she said. “There was some kind of benefit from the Birch to the Fir, there was a healthier community when they were mixed, and I wanted to figure out why.”

Simard devised a simple experiment: she isolated trees by covering them with radioactive isotopes, which could be tracked as they moved through the trees’ roots. The pattern of distribution ultimately proved that trees of completely different species were sharing food underground. In fact, Simard found that any given tree could be connected to 47 other trees around it, with the biggest and oldest trees most connected.

Jennifer Frazer, who writes the Scientific American blog, The Artful Amoeba, and who also was interviewed for Radiolab, said the tree communications network has become known as “The Wood-Wide Web.” Driving it are small—perhaps a tenth the width of a human eyelash—white, translucent, hairy threads of fungi, as NPR’s host described them. According to the segment, there can be up to seven miles of these “hairs” in a single pinch of dirt.

Once “the fungus” had been discovered, scientists realized that what had appeared to be threads were actually tubes, a hollow network connecting one tree to the next. Among other functions, the network delivers minerals to the trees, with the fungus breaking down rocks (and even fish) then delivering nutrients to the trees that need them. In return, the trees provide sugar to the fungus (which can’t photosynthesize) so that it can grow. Beyond minerals, the network facilitates sophisticated communications, including warnings issued by trees under attack to other trees nearby.

The phenomenon has been well documented, and it’s been proven that if a forest is being infested by beetles, say, trees under attack send out a kind of alert signal, which prompts neighboring trees to produce toxins that repel the invader, that taste bad to it, for example.

“The other important thing we figured out,” Simard told the program, “is that as those trees are injured and dying, they’ll dump their carbon into their neighbors. So carbon will move from that dying tree—so its resources, its legacy—will move into the network, into neighboring trees.

“One of the weirdest parts of this, though, is when sick trees give up their food, the food doesn’t usually go to their kids or even to trees of the same species... It ends up very often with trees that are new in the forest and better at surviving global warming. It’s as if the individual trees were somehow thinking ahead to the needs of the whole forest.

“We don’t normally ascribe ‘intelligence’ to plants, and plants are not thought to have brains, but when we look at the below- ground structure it looks so much like a brain physically, and now that we’re starting to understand how it works we’re going ‘Wow, there are so many parallels.’

“They talk about how honeybee colonies are sort of ‘super-organisms’ because each individual bee is sort of acting like it’s a cell in a larger body,” adds Frazer. “Once you understand that trees are all connected... they’re all signaling each other, sending food and resources to each other, it has the feel, the flavor of something very similar.” 

The Possibilities

“You go to a garden like this [at UCLA], forget about having any kind of sensitivity about spirituality or awakening, you just walk through a place like this and you can listen to the silence and you know that there’s something else going on, you know that there’s peace, you know that there’s love,” says Floyd. “I like the monarchs, the patriarchs, the trees that have been around for a long enough time and have a connection with so many of the other trees; those are the ones I like, personally.

“Trees will help to guard us, they will help to absorb things from us. They will take our grief: some people don’t know, they can go and sit at a tree and ask its permission to absorb their grief from them, and the tree will.

“Now as I work with my trees, I just try and do the best I can. I make them safer so they’re not going to fail, have a branch break or fall over, but I really, really, really try and listen. I’ll argue with clients—‘No, I’m not going to cut that off’—my sensitivity has gotten even greater for it. I’m an advocate, and I never thought I’d be saying this, but I’m an advocate for these trees and this planet and for the children of this planet.” 

FLOYD:  workerinthelight.com   •   tree-guardian.com

THE RADIOLAB PODCAST:  radiolab.org