Mycelium Rising

Installation at Arcadia Audubon Wildlife Preserve – Summer – Winter 2023 – 24

Why are there threads among the trees?

Being among the trees and plants in a place is to sense into the filigree of the more-than-human world. Walking the threads between the trees while making this poem invites an action state in me. The landscape comes alive. I can sense the trees treeing, the plants planting, the earth earthing. This visual thread poem is an invitation to aliveness and to opening up our sensing capacities. By making the invisible visible, Underlanding invites us to feel into the interconnectedness of all living beings. A pamphlet about the installation was available to visitors. Here is the text:

This thread poem is a response to reading about what happens under our feet in the forest — specifically, it is about mycelium. Mycelium are fungal networks that form as tubular, hollow structures made of hyphae cells. They form a filigreed network that exists in the soil. Merlin Sheldrake, in his book Entangled Life, states that mycelium are best imagined “not as a thing, but as a process — a process that is exploratory and irregular.” (1) This network of tubes carries nutrients and information between trees and plants within an ecosystem for the benefit of all. Some types of mycelium even carry electrical signals through the network that are akin to nerve cell activation in animals. 

During the course of the installation, pamphlets were available for visitors to take with them. Below is the text and image from the pamphlet.

The mycelium we find in forests are called mycorrhizal networks. The word mycorrhizal comes from the words for fungus (myco) and root (rhizzal). These fungal roots move through the soil and “weave into the tips of plant roots at a cellular level,” (2) creating a subterranean, symbiotic and connected network beneath the forest floor. It has been called the “Wood Wide Web” by the laboratory researcher of mycorrhizal biology David Read and proved to exist in the forest by Susan Simard, a professor of forest ecology.  In her book Finding the Mother Tree about her life and research, Simard calls this mycorrhizal network an “underground social network” and a “bustling community of mycorrhizal fungal species.” (3) Simard also discovered that trees share resources between species and that the older the tree, the more connections it has to other trees. She suggests that it is best to see trees in a forest not as individuals, but as a “co-operative system.” (4) In her research findings, Simard states that the fungi and the trees have “forged their duality into a oneness, thereby making a forest.” (5) 

This kind of system can be described as a form of mutualism. Sheldrake describes mutualism as a “subset of symbiosis in which there exists between organisms a prolonged relationship that is interdependent and reciprocally beneficial.” (6) 

Beneath our feet in the forest, so much is happening. Robin Wall Kimmerer suggests that the English language is inadequate for capturing this animation. In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, she describes the Potawatomi language as being made up of 70% verbs. In that language, aspects of the landscape all around, such as lakes or trees, are verbs — a tree is treeing and a lake is lakeing. Thus, in Potawatomi, their aliveness as beings are more fully expressed. Kimmerer calls for a “grammar of animacy” that can invite humans to consider the more-than-human world. As Ursula Le Guin writes in her novel set on the fictional forested planet of Athshe, woodland beings communicate through the network of trees. She gives us a world that is alive in its animated connectedness and invites us into this grammar of animacy by calling the book The Word for World is Forest. (7) Leguin creates a fictional planet. But the reality is as indigenous peoples all over planet Earth have always known: All beings are interconnected and live in the emergent space between order and chaos. Similar to a ragged coastline, this space is non-linear, constantly adapting and responding to the needs of the whole. Every part matters, and is animatedly alive. (8). 

 “Map of a shared fungal network (made by Kevin Beiler). 

The green shapes are Douglas fir trees, and the straight lines indicate linkages between tree roots and mycorrhizal fungi. The black dots mark the points where Beiler collected samples. …Networks formed by the mycorrhizal fungus Rhizopogon vesiculosus are shaded in blue, and those formed by the fungus Rhizopogon vinicolor are shaded in pink. The black border marks the 30 x 30 meter plot, and an arrow points to the most highly connected tree, which was linked to 47 other trees. Image reproduced from Beiler, et al. (2009).” (9)

(1) Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life – How fungi make our worlds, change our minds & shape our futures. p.6.

(2, 3) Macfarlane. Robert. Underland – a deep time journey P.89. 

(4, 5) Macfarlane. Robert. Underland – a deep time journey p.90. 

(6) Macfarlane. Robert. Underland – a deep time journey p.97.  

(7) Macfarlane. Robert. Underland – a deep time journey P.105. 

(8) Buhner. Stephen Harrold. Plant intelligence and the imaginal realm. Into the dreaming of earth. P.77. 

(9) Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life – How fungi make our worlds, change our minds & shape our futures. (color insert).