Gifts from the Sentient Forest
Communication & Collaboration Between People & Trees in Northern Finland

Gifts from the Sentient Forest (2024-26)

Research Background

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Photo Credit: Francis Joy

Forests make life on Earth possible by nurturing biodiversity, regulating water quality, mitigating climate fluctuations, affording habitats for pollinators, and supplying food, fibre, medicine, shelter, well-being, and other forms of sustenance (FAO and UNEP 2020, 162–163). As the global population surges past eight billion people, however, more and more of the planet’s natural resources are required to satisfy human needs at the expense of other life forms. Global deforestation and ecosystem degradation continue to accelerate, with an estimated four-hundred million hectares of forests converted to agricultural and other uses since 1990 (FAO and UNEP 2020, xvi). Yet, apart from their ecological importance, old forests have aesthetic, cultural, emotional, and spiritual value because of the powerful capacities that reside within them and that can, through close observation, remind us of the origins of life on Earth. Forests are natural and cultural nexuses. Ancient trees in particular are connected to personal and collective histories and identities. As old forests disappear, the cultural heritage associated with them risks becoming extinct (UNESCO 2023).

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Parallel to the increasing threats to forest vitality worldwide lies a burgeoning body of research revealing how trees cope intelligently with environmental changes. The science of plant cognition examines attributes of communication, memory, kinship, and altruism in forests (Baluška, Gagliano, and Witzany 2018; Baluška and Levin 2016). Described as ‘sentinels’ (Ribeiro and da Silva Torres 2018)  and ‘mother trees’ (Simard 2021), wise old trees recall ecological experiences and transmit their memories to subsequent generations to enhance the resilience of offspring. The imparting of experiential knowledge from older to younger trees through memory networks highlights the importance of age and diversity to long-term ecosystem health (Galviz, Ribeiro, and Souza 2020). More specifically, ubiquitous underground fungal systems known as mycorrhizal networks facilitate forest memory through the root-soil interface, or rhizosphere. Making memory and other capacities in trees possible, mycorrhizae are regarded by scientists as responsible for “the diverse intelligence present among humans and forests” (Simard 2018, 197).  

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The term ‘sentient’ in our proposal’s title conveys the view that forests not only have the ability to think and respond but also to feel and remember. In our proposed research, we understand the concept of ‘sentience’ as inclusive of the myriad capacities of trees and other plants for sensing, communication, behaviour, memory, and other percipient qualities associated with intelligence. Indeed, the premise of sentience has begun to permeate popular thinking about plants, forming the basis, for instance, of the recent Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory (Powers 2018) as well as influential works of narrative non-fiction such as The Songs of Trees (Haskell 2017) and Finding the Mother Tree (Simard 2021). At the same time, the notion continues to provide an inspiring basis internationally for a range of creative practices involving communication and collaboration between people, plants, trees, and forests (Ryan 2017). In Southern Finland, as a case in point, artist Annette Arlander (2019) has developed a series of performances with shrubs and trees in order to address the question of how to collaborate with more-than-human beings.  

In Northern Finland—comprising Finnish Lapland and the provinces of Kainuu and Northern Ostrobothnia including the urban areas of Oulu and Rovaniemi—the harvesting of old trees for timber and other materials has resulted in the widespread decline of ancient boreal forests. Industrial-scale forestry has led to the homogenisation of forest structures and the reduction of ecologically salient features, such as large old trees, characteristic of healthy northern ecosystems (Aakala, Kulha, and Kuuluvainen 2023). Moreover, the impacts of climate change on Northern Finland’s forests are especially harrowing. During the cold months, snowfall has declined markedly while summer temperatures are becoming more unpredictable. Climate disturbance is predicted to significantly alter the composition of forests and the distribution of species, fracturing the long-standing interdependencies between people and trees in the country’s north. A report by The Finnish Climate Change Panel warns that Finnish Lapland—and the Rovaniemi area in particular—will experience catastrophic flooding as a consequence of climate change (Salonen 2021). Much about trees and their sentient attributes, additionally, has been forgotten or repressed over the course of Western industrialisation—the root of our present climate emergency.

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To address ecological crisis in Northern Finland, therefore, it is time for municipal governments and the general public to rethink policies and philosophies allowing the massive destruction of old forests for economic reasons. In this context, our proposed project, ‘Gifts from the Sentient Forest’, promises a multidisciplinary intervention that will promote new perspectives on the region’s forests and the rich cultural legacies surrounding them. At the project’s heart is ‘forest sentience’, a concept with significant implications for the current era of environmental disruption. As biologists observe, understandings of forests as sentient systems are crucial to addressing the ecological and social challenges of the present (Popkin 2019). Viewing forest sentience as a means to redress biospheric disruption, researchers František Baluška and Stefano Mancuso (2020) highlight the idea’s “profound consequences not just for future climate scenarios but also for understanding [humanity’s] role and position within the Earth’s biosphere” (1). Engaging diverse audiences in learning about the sentience of forests has the potential to transform historically engrained perceptions of trees and other botanical forms as merely economic commodities, natural resources, or genetic repositories.  

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Aims and Objectives

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Guided by the central idea of ‘gifts from the sentient forest’, the project aims to inspire innovative approaches to trees and other plants through insights drawn from the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts. Our project endeavours to understand how recognising plants, trees, and forests in contexts other than exploitation can shed light on the complex ways in which botanical life rejuvenates human-nature relationships and sustains the Earth. Fostering human intimacies with individual trees and the ecological communities of which they are part, the research programme formulates a set of practical approaches to countering ‘plant blindness’—the inability to notice the flora of one’s surroundings exacerbated by the broader cultural failure to value the multidimensional significance of plant life (Balding and Williams 2016). Developed in the context of Northern Finland, these approaches centre programme participants’ attention on the wisdom of trees as expressed through songs, poetry, stories, artworks, photography, performances, and other media. Gifts come in many forms—from the face of a learned sage perceived suddenly in the bark of a birch tree to the personal healing that results from immersive sensory exposure to ecologically vibrant forests over many seasons.

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Our research questions include:  

• What does sentience in the botanical world entail? How should forest sentience be defined and conceptualised in relation to Northern Finland?

• What are the creative, educational, social, personal, and health-related implications of recognising and, subsequently, remembering trees as sentient beings?

• How might the acknowledgement of sentience provide a basis for communication and collaboration between humans and other life forms?

• What gifts arise when one attempts to communicate and collaborate with forests from this perspective?

• What does creative collaboration with arboreal life involve? Which strategies and tools best facilitate human communication with trees? What demands does this approach place on those accustomed to viewing environments in utilitarian terms?

• What are the most effective methods for teaching others to communicate and collaborate with more-than-humans?

• How might a view of forests as sentient systems impact environmental policy, practices, and management in Northern Finland?

Our objective is to consider the above questions closely with respect to the forest communities of Northern Finland, emphasising old-growth reserves of spruce, pine, birch, and aspen as well as tree communities located in the urban and suburban areas of Oulu and Rovaniemi. Subject to ongoing ecological change, ancient forests comprise trees of diverse ages, including decaying and dead ones (Metsähallitus 2023). In the Northern context, the project investigates the potential of forest sentience to act as groundwork for cultivating communication and collaboration, thus inspiring a personal transformation of spirituality, consciousness, awareness, and values. In other words, the project examines how the concept of forest sentience can challenge one’s fixed belief systems, influence people to think differently, and encourage open-mindedness towards the more-than-human world. As artists, writers, and facilitators, our common goal is to promote awareness of the gifts trees and other plants have to offer in an age of ecological crisis.

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Research Materials and Methods

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‘Gifts from the Sentient Forest’ brings together the expertise of the project’s two Working Group Members, Dr Francis Joy of the University of Lapland Arctic Centre, Rovaniemi, Finland, and Dr John C. Ryan of Southern Cross University, Australia. While Francis Joy’s method of engaging trees as sentient beings focuses on spiritual dimensions, John C. Ryan’s approach will explore possibilities for deepening multisensory interactions with plant life. United in our appreciation of the gifts of plants and trees, our complementary approaches engender communication and collaboration with forests, promoting the recognition of botanical life as responsive, interactive, and intelligent. Of course, plants do not necessarily communicate in ways immediately apprehended by us. In contrast, they tend to express themselves through feelings, sensations, emotions, moods, atmospheres, and, as science demonstrates, chemical and electrical signals. From our perspective, communication and collaboration depend on the relationships we develop with trees. Accordingly, our two-year project comprises two concurrent research components, each of which has its own materials and methods: (a) developing our creative work as artists and writers collaborating with botanical life in Finland; and (b) supporting others in deepening their connections to trees through spiritual and sensory modalities.

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Francis Joy is a researcher, poet, and artist whose ‘Tree Faces Project’ explored the faces and forms he photographed during fieldwork around Rovaniemi and Oulu between 2020 and 2022. The project resulted in an exhibition of eighty tree images at the University of Oulu Botanical Garden in 2023. The phenomenon known as pareidolia refers to the perception of faces in trees created by fissures, cracks, growths, and other features. Encountered in the trunks, roots, and branches of trees, the faces of humans, animals, reptiles, insects, and mythical beings can inspire poetry, art, and spiritual experience (Haberman 2010; Southorn 2020). Certain visual arrangements of faces in trees symbolise the visionary powers associated with a particular species endowed by Mother Nature. The project’s inclusion of many different tree species ensured diverse photographic compositions that reflected the artist’s development of heightened sensory and spiritual awareness of Northern Finland’s forests (University of Oulu 2023). In order to generate more interest in the plight of boreal forests, some of the images were published in his poetry collections A Book of 100 Poems and Magical Verses (2021) and Wild Wisdom from the Arctic North (2022).

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Francis Joy has been teaching about the powers associated with trees for several decades through ‘guided magical tree walks’ conducted at the botanical gardens of the University of Helsinki and the University of Oulu. In a joint project funded by the European Union through the University of Lapland’s Faculty of Art and Design in 2021, he worked with a group of art students from different countries and backgrounds in the forest at Vikaköngäs near Rovaniemi. The project aimed to teach participants how to approach trees and establish communication with them through various methods (Huhmarniemi and Joy 2022). Between 2021 and 2022, moreover, Francis Joy worked with groups of children from the Steiner Waldorf School in Oulu at Villa Pukkila. After participating in a series of exercises in the forest, the students returned to the classroom to paint what they remembered about the qualities of individual trees. Focusing on faces and forms in trees is a spiritual practice developing careful attention to special features that we identify as ‘gifts’. These gifts become a source of inspiration and, as such, can be used to develop non-verbal communication with other life forms.

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Immersive experiences in forests enable us to learn from trees and benefit from their rejuvenative presence. Practitioners of pareidolia encounter forms that depend on particular environments such as riverbanks, valleys, hills, or fells. The appearance of an alder, for instance, might reflect the tree’s association with the riverbank as a liminal place representing a threshold between physical and spiritual realms. Birch and willow are two of the main species in which a vast array of faces and other features, including eyes, can be encountered when examined from different angles and approaches. The branches and trunks of willow trees can evoke the powers of dragons, serpents, and other mythical beings because of thick, gnarled bark associated, for example, with white-silver willows (Salix alba) and globe willows (Salix matsudana ‘Navajo’) that tend to form canopies in hedgerows and parks. In other cases, one might perceive several faces on an individual tree or eyes on different parts of the tree. Some features appear where a branch has been cut or broken off, causing the area to overgrow in a way that enhances the tree’s adaptation to stress. These faces reflect the beauty of Mother Nature’s imperfections, which might at first seem strange to the untrained eye. Identifying the emotional and affective nuances of arboreal faces promotes empathy in observers (Huhmarniemi and Joy 2022).

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John C. Ryan is a researcher, poet, and editor who, in 2023, was a Visiting Fellow in the Biodiverse Anthropocenes Programme at the University of Oulu. During his three-month fellowship, he facilitated ‘Writing in the Garden: A Creative Writing Workshop on Plants, Botany, and the Senses’ at the Oulu Botanical Garden and convened the international seminar ‘Nordic Plant Humanities Symposium: Plants, People, and Ecologies’ while researching potential focal areas for practitioners of the interdisciplinary field of the plant humanities in Finland. He has read, performed, published, and taught poetry in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and India. From 2017–20, he developed an innovative community poetry programme in Australia based on the local environment and the senses. In collaboration with naturalists and ecologists, he delivered interactive workshops for adults and children through the New England Writers’ Centre in Armidale, New South Wales. Structured around the four seasons of the Australian highlands, the programme brought attention to the senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, and kinaesthesia as a foundation for helping participants gain a more nuanced awareness of their local flora. The poetry written by workshop participants evoked a range of emotions, feelings, and memories related to plants. The community-focused educational initiative served as a basis for his three-year postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of New England, Australia.   

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For two decades, John Ryan’s poetry, non-fiction, short fiction, and research have explored human-flora relationships through the possibility of plants possessing innate sentience. His creative and critical work coalesce around the idea of phytopoetics, understood broadly as creative practices of diverse kinds that integrate the intelligence of plant life (Ryan 2023). At the same time, his writing has aimed to render visible the ways in which human beings mind plants through acts of caring, attachment, and affection in Oceania, Southeast Asia, North America, Northern Europe, and elsewhere. As evident in his co-edited anthology The Mind of Plants (2021), the idea of the sentient plant has enjoyed a revival of late in popular and scientific domains. Collaboration with plants presents generative possibilities for enhancing appreciation of the natural world. Approaching poetry as medium of dialogue between intelligent subjects, his work probes questions of communication and collaboration with plants through place-specific methods (Ryan 2020). These include large-format installation poems displayed as visual artworks or featured alongside botanical art; poems subjected to editorial decomposition over time by water, wind, sun, animals, microorganisms, and other natural elements; and poems incorporating first-person narration from plants’ perspectives. He has also collaborated extensively with scientists, artists, photographers, musicians, and other poets, as evident in his poetry collections Two With Nature (Ryan and Hickman 2012) and Seeing Trees: A Poetic Arboretum (Ryan and Phillips 2020).

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As an evolution of our previous work, ‘Gifts from the Sentient Forest’ focuses on communication and collaboration with plants through methods we have developed over many decades. In particular, the research methodology will incorporate the endemic seasonality of Northern Finland. Rather than limited to four seasons, the region has at least eight: Pakkastalvi (frosty winter), Hankikanto (spring of crusted snow or snowdrift spring), Jäidenlähtökevät (ice break-up or ice-run spring), Keskiyönauringon aika (light green summer or nightless night), Sadonkorjuunaika (harvest time), Ruska (colourful autumn), Mustalumi (first snow), and Joulukaamos (Christmas or polar nights) (City of Rovaniemi 2023). Awareness of the turning of the seasons depends, to a great extent, on the perception of changes in plant life.

Along with flora and fauna, the unique seasonal cycles of Northern Finland should be preserved and protected yet are increasingly destabilised by climate change and other factors. Our research, therefore, reinforces the significance of seasonal consciousness to human relationships with plants, trees, and forests. In addition to its emphasis on seasonality, the programme adopts a place-based approach centred initially on three sites chosen for their arboreal diversity and visitor infrastructure: Ylläs (175 kilometres north of Rovaniemi), Vikaköngäs (25 kilometres north of Rovaniemi), and the University of Oulu Botanical Garden. Although other sites may be later added to the research project, we mention these three because of our prior experiences facilitating plant-related educational programmes at each. ‘Gifts from the Sentient Forest’ offers diverse opportunities to promote reconciliation with the Earth through the acknowledgement of sentience in trees, plants and forests.

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References and Sources

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The project is grounded theoretically in the plant humanities, an inter-/transdisciplinary domain of scholarship concerning plants and their multifaceted intersections with humans. The term plant humanities denotes humanistic interpretation in the study of plants, society, culture, history, art, literature, and other disciplines. Its methods and methodologies comprise historical and archival approaches; multispecies ethnography (e.g., interviews and participant observation); textual and discourse analysis; digital humanities; creative, arts-based, practice-led approaches; and collaborative multispecies frameworks (Driver and Cornish 2021). Key references and sources include:  

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Aakala, Tuomas, Niko Kulha, and Timo Kuuluvainen. 2023. “Human Impact on Forests in Early Twentieth Century Finland.” Landscape Ecology 31 May. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-023-01688-w.

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Arlander, Annette. 2019. “Resting with Pines in Nida – Attempts at Performing with Plants.” Performance Philosophy 4 (2): 452–475. https://www.performancephilosophy.org/journal/article/view/232/323.

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Balding, Mung, and Kathryn J.H. Williams. 2016. “Plant Blindness and the Implications for Plant Conservation.” Conservation Biology 30 (6): 1192–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.12738.

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Baluška, František, Monica Gagliano, and Guenther Witzany, eds. 2018. Memory and Learning in Plants. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

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Baluška, František, and Michael Levin. 2016. “On Having No Head: Cognition Throughout Biological Systems.” Frontiers in Psychology 7: 1–19. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00902.

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Baluška, František, and Stefano Mancuso. 2020. “Plants, Climate and Humans: Plant Intelligence Changes Everything.” EMBO Reports 21 (3): 1–5.

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City of Rovaniemi. 2023. “Eight Seasons.” Accessed 12 July. https://international.rovaniemi.fi/en/8-seasons.

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Driver, Felix, and Caroline Cornish. 2021. “Plant Humanities: Where Arts, Humanities, and Plants Meet.” TEA: The Ethnobotanical Assembly 8. Accessed 13 July 2023. https://www.tea-assembly.com/issues/8/plant-humanities

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Dwyer, Rachael, Iam Davis, and elke emerald, eds. 2017. Narrative Research in Practice: Stories from the Field. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

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FAO and UNEP. 2020. The State of the World’s Forests 2020: Forests, Biodiversity, and People. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

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Galviz, Yutcelia C. F., Rafael V. Ribeiro, and Gustavo M. Souza. 2020. “Yes, Plants Do Have Memory.” Theoretical and Experimental Plant Physiology 32 (3): 195–202.

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Haberman, David L. 2010. “Faces in the Trees.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 4 (2): 173–190. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v4i2.173

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Haskell, David George. 2017. The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors. Carlton: Black Inc.

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Huhmarniemi, Maria, and Francis Joy. 2022. “Forest Encounters: Communication with Trees, Stones, and Powers of Nature.” In Relate North #9, edited by Glen Coutts and Timo Jokela, 106–125. Viseu, Portugal: InSEA Publications.

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Joy, Francis. 2021. A Book of 100 Poems and Magical Verses. Rovaniemi, Finland: Pohjolan Palvelut Oy.

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---. 2022. Wild Wisdom from the Arctic North: A Book of 100 Magical Poems, Verses, and Thinking. Rovaniemi, Finland: Pohjolan Palvelut Oy.

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Metsähallitus. 2023. “Old-growth Forest Reserves.” Accessed 12 July. https://www.metsa.fi/en/lands-and-waters/protected-areas/nature-reserves/old-growth-forest-reserves/.

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Popkin, Gabriel. 2019. “‘Wood Wide Web’—The Underground Network of Microbes That Connects Trees—Mapped For First Time.” Science May 15. doi: 10.1126/science.aay0516.

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Powers, Richard. 2018. The Overstory. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

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Ribeiro, Rafael V., and Ricardo da Silva Torres. 2018. “Sentinel Plants as Programmable Processing Units: Insights From a Multidisciplinary Perspective About Stress Memory and Plant Signaling and Their Relevance at Community Level.” Plant Signaling & Behavior 13 (10): 1–3.

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Ryan, John C. 2017. “Poetry as Plant Script: Interspecies Dialogue and Poetic Collaboration in the Northern Tablelands Region of New South Wales.” Transformations 30: 127–149.

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---. 2020. “Writing the Lives of Plants: Phytography and the Botanical Imagination.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 25 (1): 97–122.

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---. 2023. “Phytopoetics: Human-Plant Relations and the Poiesis of Vegetal Life.” In The Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics, edited by Julia Fiedorczuk, Mary Newell, Bernard Quetchenbach and Orchid Tierney, 117–126. New York: Routledge.

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Ryan, John C., and Ellen Hickman. 2012. Two With Nature: The Botanical Poetry of John Ryan and the Botanical Art of Ellen Hickman. Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Press.

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Ryan, John C., and Glen Phillips. 2020. Seeing Trees: A Poetic Arboretum. Montrose, CO: Pinyon Publishing.

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Ryan, John C., Patricia Vieira, and Monica Gagliano, eds. 2021. The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence. Santa Fe, NM: Synergetic Press.

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Salonen, Saara-Maria. 2021. “Climate Change Report Warns of Multiple Threats [to] Finnish Lapland.” Arctic Today 4 October.

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Simard, Suzanne. 2018. “Mycorrhizal Networks Facilitate Tree Communication, Learning, and Memory.” In Memory and Learning in Plants, edited by František Baluška, Monica Gagliano and Guenther Witzany, 191–213. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

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---. 2021. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. New York: Penguin Random House.

Southorn, Ed. 2020. “Faces in Trees.”Axon: Creative Explorations 10 (2): 1–20.

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UNESCO. 2023. “UNESCO World Heritage Forests.” Accessed 10 July. https://whc.unesco.org/en/forests/.

University of Oulu. 2023. “Science Garden: Trees Faces Exhibition by Francis Joy.” Accessed 10 July. https://www.oulu.fi/en/university/science-garden.

Vear, Craig, ed. 2021. The Routledge International Handbook of Practice-Based Research. New York: Routledge.