Restoring Family Trees
Tree Tag #914 on Baylor's Sustainability Map
By Garrett Brownlee for Dr. Joshua King's ENG 2301: British Literature class, Fall 2025
This reflection is part of a series of “Tree Stories” by Baylor students that take root in their observations about a tree on campus, branch into connections between their tree and their experiences and education, and leaf out into a creative response to the tree.
Welcome
For many people, their biggest concern is the failure to leave behind a legacy—a fear of being forgotten. Many trees face this very concern today, with their sacrifices for us going largely unrecognized. My hope is that by hearing my story, and seeing these ideas reflected in literary works, you are inspired to give conscious attention to the trees in your environment. I encourage you to begin forming relationships with them, just as I have done.
Roots
For this assignment, I chose a tree in the place most important to me on campus: the Garden of Contentment, right next to Baylor’s Armstrong Browning Library. Despite spending most of my time there over the last three years, I had never truly appreciated Tree #914. It is a Live Oak (Quercus virginiana), a species beloved in Texas, yet this specific tree is struggling. The first thing I noticed was its odd shape; it has significantly more vegetation on the right side, thinning out towards the top as if struggling with the passage of time. Most strikingly, an electrical box is mounted directly onto its trunk, with lines running underground that likely interfere with its root system. Baylor’s "Sustainability Map" lists this tree in "poor condition" due to exposed wood sites, and it has lost multiple limbs—essentially the entire left side—to prevent overcrowding or building damage. Despite these injuries, it continues to provide shade and support the electricity we students use to study. This resilience immediately reminded me of The Dream of the Rood. Just as the Rood was a "tree" forced to become an instrument of torture yet stood firm to serve a higher purpose ("I dared not bow or break against the Lord’s word"), my tree is bundled in harmful electrical equipment and chopped for convenience, yet it still serves us. It is a suffering servant, offering shade and power to students who, like the dreamers in the poem, often fail to recognize the sacrifice being made for their benefit.
Branches
Since my initial encounter with Tree #914, I have returned numerous times to study underneath it. While I try to view it with "fresh eyes" each visit, I am frequently drawn back to the visible suffering it endures to service us humans. One Friday, after discussing Rabindranath Tagore’s short story Balai in class, I visited the Garden of Contentment to finish my assignments. That afternoon, the connection between my tree and Tagore’s story became painfully clear: the life of Tree #914 parallels that of the silk-cotton tree in Balai. In the story, the silk-cotton tree is beloved by the young boy, Balai, but considered a nuisance by his uncle. The tree is only allowed to stand because Balai loves it; his affection is the tree’s figurative and literal trunk. However, once Balai is sent away to England, his connection to the tree is severed. His aunt, who only cared for the tree because she loved Balai, eventually forgets it. Tagore writes, "And she kept thinking that Balai must have outgrown all those things he had left behind" (Tagore, 653). With Balai gone and the tree having no voice of its own, the uncle finally cuts it down. The tree only mattered because it mattered to Balai. My tree faces a similar precarious existence. Its health has visibly declined, documented annually by students, yet the source of its stress—the electrical box
and root interference—remains because the tree is viewed primarily as infrastructure rather than a living being. Whoever installed that box likely knew it might harm the tree but prioritized utility over the organism’s health. Much like the uncle in Balai, the university manages the tree for human convenience. The "branches" of my thought here are that a tree often cannot survive in an urban environment without a human advocate. Unless people stop to enjoy the shade and acknowledge the provider of that shade, the tree remains vulnerable. Just as the silk-cotton tree was doomed without Balai’s presence, Tree #914 is vulnerable without students who care enough to notice its "poor condition." The only way to remove the harm is for someone to stand up for it. Until we bridge the gap between utility and empathy—moving from the uncle’s mindset to Balai’s—trees like #914 will continue to be unappreciated and abused, sacrificing themselves for a legacy they are not permitted to have.
Leaves
Building upon my reflections on the tree’s "poor condition" and the lack of human advocacy, I began to wonder how we could practically reverse this damage. While The Dream of the Rood suggests a spiritual reverence for trees, I found a more actionable scientific solution in Robert Macfarlane’s Underland. Macfarlane describes the "wood wide web," a fungal network where trees "share nutrients by means of an underground system that conjoined their roots beneath the soil, thereby sometimes nursing the sick tree back to health" (Macfarlane, 1). This concept—that trees are not solitary individuals but a family capable of communal care—inspired my creative response. If we cannot easily force busy students to "worship" trees, perhaps we can encourage them to protect the underground networks that allow trees to heal themselves.
Introduction
For my "Leaves" contribution, I have created a short, persuasive video explaining this "wood wide web." The video uses the analogy of an electrical circuit to explain this biological connection, directly referencing the electrical box scarring my own tree. I aim to visualize how a tree acts as a conductor for the health of the entire ecosystem. The analogy underscores how a single failing component can disrupt an entire interconnected system, whether in a circuit, a forest, or a community. By comparing tree anatomy to human anatomy and demonstrating how this underground "circuit" functions, I hope to make this invisible network visible, in our hearts and our minds. In conclusion, hopefully you now have a greater appreciation for tree communities and all that they do for us. With this newfound appreciation, you can begin to heal them; either directly at the individual level, or on the family level of the “wood wide web.” So now, you see that tree’s really aren’t much different from you and I, or the relationships we maintain. We should treat them with the golden rule, taking care of them as we wish to be taken care of!
Creative Response
Works Cited
MacFarlane, Robert. “Understorey.”
Tagore, Rabindranath. "Balai."