When Trees Testify: Reckoning with Black History Through the Science and Wisdom of Plants

By Beronda L. Montgomery

An award-winning plant biologist reclaims the history of Black botanical expertise, and of enslaved Black Americans, through the stories of seven long-lived trees

Like all plants, trees ‘inhale’ the carbon dioxide exhaled by us, and transform it into sugars through photosynthesis. These sugars do more than provide food for trees – they help to produce the actual wood that gives trees their forms. As Beronda L. Montgomery eloquently writes in When Trees Testify, ‘Trees are material evidence of the exhaled quintessence of humans past and present.’ They are truly living witnesses to the past.

The histories of long-lived trees in America, therefore, are also the histories of enslaved Black Americans. These histories are connected by more than chemistry: pecan trees were domesticated by an enslaved African named Antoine; sycamore trees were both havens and signposts for people trying to escape their lives of enslavement; poplar trees are historically associated with lynching – these trees, and others, testify not only to complex Black American history, but also to a legacy of Black botanical expertise that predates America entirely. In When Trees Testify, Montgomery tells the stories of seven trees, along with the cotton shrub, as they tell the stories of her ancestors before her.