The Overstory

by

Richard Powers

The Overstory: Part 1: Roots—Patricia Westerford Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
As a child in 1950, Patricia Westerford creates tiny creatures out of seeds, sticks, and leaves to play with. She rarely speaks, and for years her parents are worried that she has a mental disability. Finally, a doctor discovers that she is deaf, and now she wears hearing aids, though she doesn’t like them. Patty (Patricia) and her father Bill Westerford are extremely close, and Bill understands both her tiny, created worlds and her slurred speech. Bill is an agriculture extension agent, and he frequently tours farms around southwestern Ohio, taking Patty along with him. Though Patty’s mother objects, Bill convinces her that these trips will teach their daughter more than any classroom could.
Patricia feels close to trees from a very early age, and she will go on to make many of The Overstory’s strongest arguments for the importance of preserving forests. Her love for trees is both inspired and nurtured by her father, and her difficulty hearing and communicating in early childhood might also contribute to her comfort with a lack of human company, alone in nature. Bill is an agriculture extension agent, meaning that he takes part in educational programs about farming practices in rural areas.
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As they drive together on their road trips, Bill teaches Patty all about trees and then quizzes her on her knowledge. She loves answering one particular question: that a name carved four feet high in a beech tree will still be four feet high after 50 years of growth. Eventually she starts to realize what her father is trying to teach her: that plants have lives, personalities, and goals all their own. In school, Patty doesn’t relate to the other children at all, only finding refuge in her father and the world of plants.
Patricia recognizes trees as fellow living creatures very early on, aided by her wise and knowledgeable father. As with many of the other characters in The Overstory, she finds herself disconnected from the rest of humanity (besides her father). This fact about the name carved four feet high in a beech tree becomes an important memory for Patricia.
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Together on their work trips, Bill and Patty travel from farm to farm, all of them either suffering from blight or fast using up their topsoil in the pursuit of monocrops. Bill laments all the lost trees and how little humans know about how trees actually live and grow. From her father, Patty slowly learns that all human wisdom and factual knowledge is temporary, and that “the only dependable things are humility and looking.”
Here, the book briefly comments on the fact that many modern agricultural practices are extremely harmful to nature—and they’re not even profitable in the long term. This passage also returns to the idea that there is a definition of meaning that is beyond what most people can conceive of, and which is here linked to quiet observation and attention (“humility and looking”).
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Quotes
One day, Bill helps Patricia design an experiment to find out where all the bulk of a tree comes from, such that it can grow from a tiny seed to something so huge. They weigh a tub of soil, weigh a small beechnut tree, and then plant the tree in the soil, as Bill explains how the word “beech” became the word “book.” Bill says they will weigh the tree and the soil again in six years, when Patty turns 16. Patty is delighted by this, and she realizes that she’s doing science.
Several other languages (along with the English “beech” and “book” mentioned here) also have etymologies for words about writing and language that originate from words for trees. Patricia is fascinated not only by nature, but also by the scientific method.
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Years pass, and Patty—now Patricia—is almost as knowledgeable as her father regarding trees. For her 14th birthday, Bill gives her a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Patricia is struck by the book’s first sentence: “Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.” She is drawn to the stories that follow, and especially loves the ones about people turning into trees, like the myth of Baucis and Philemon. The next winter, Bill is driving home when his car hits a patch of ice, and he is killed in the crash. Patricia reads from Ovid at the funeral. She is devastated and saves all of her father’s possessions.
In the myth of Baucis and Philemon, the gods Zeus and Hermes came to earth in disguise and were rejected by everyone except for one old couple who welcomed them into their home. As a reward for their hospitality, the gods allowed the couple (Baucis and Philemon) to become trees after their death, an oak and a linden intertwined forever. This idea of metamorphosis further connects trees and humans as almost interchangeable living beings.
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Patricia barely survives high school, keeping to herself, dressing plainly, and avoiding boys. She gets into Eastern Kentucky University, where she will study botany. One day before she leaves for school, she remembers the beech tree that she and her father planted for their experiment. She is ashamed to have forgotten about it for two years longer than they had originally planned, and she spends an afternoon freeing the tree from its soil and weighing it. The tree has grown much heavier, she finds, but the soil weighs exactly the same. Patricia realizes what her father was trying to teach her: all the tree’s mass comes from the air, not the soil. She replants the tree beside the house and places a small notch in its bark, four feet above the ground.
Bill is seemingly Patricia’s only real connection to other people (her mother and siblings are hardly even mentioned), and so growing up she remains a loner who only feels comfortable in nature. The notch that she makes in the beech tree is a poignant reminder of her father and his many lessons about trees. Though Patricia briefly forgets about their experiment with weighing the trees, she is clearly still centering her life’s work on Bill’s teachings, as she plans to study botany in college.
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Patricia blossoms at college, filling her dorm room with plants. She still doesn’t understand other people her age, but she is happy working at the campus greenhouses, taking classes, and reading. She prefers the natural history books from her father’s library to the novels that her peers enjoy. Though she doesn’t seek out attention, people are drawn to her authenticity and sureness. Boys even ask her out on dates. She goes out with one boy for a few months and has sex for the first time.
Patricia manages to remain true to herself and also start to find connection with other people. She continues to focus on science and botany even in her new and more open environment.
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After college, Patricia goes to forestry school at Purdue. She teaches undergrads in exchange for room and board and can hardly believe her luck. By her second year, however, she starts to realize the “catch.” All her professors and peers believe in cleaning dead growth from forests, making them “thrifty” and economically beneficial. Patricia knows they are wrong—“a healthy forest must need dead trees”—but she doesn’t have data to back up her views. She hopes that her professors’ beliefs will eventually fade away, and then she will have her time to shine.
Patricia brings her lifelong love of trees as complex living beings to a practice that, at this point, is focused on making nature most productive for humanity. She is finally surrounded by fellow forestry scientists, but they have fundamentally different views about the value of forests and the web of life and death within them.
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Patricia tries to teach her theories to her undergrads, and she generally gets on well with her fellow students despite their disagreements on forestry. She even has a brief romantic encounter with a woman in plant genetics, but she purposefully represses her embarrassed memory of it afterwards. Meanwhile, she continues to develop a theory that trees are actually social beings. No one else in the forestry school agrees, however.
Patricia’s personal growth and blossoming echoes the trees she loves so much, though she still is restrained in her willingness to open up to other people. The idea that trees are social beings with their own kind of consciousness would go against everything her professors are currently teaching, as it would mean that they have value and rights in themselves, not just as resources for humans to use.
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Purdue receives a new machine—a quadrupole mass spectrometer—which Patricia realizes she can use to measure what gases trees release and how they affect other trees. She presents the idea to her advisor, saying that she believes trees behave differently in a wild forest than they do in cultivation. The advisor is skeptical but allows her to work as she sees fit. Patricia starts immediately and loves the often-monotonous work. Her experiment consists of taping plastic bags over the ends of branches to collect chemicals that the tree releases, and then bringing the samples back to the lab and analyzing them. Out in the woods all day, Patricia feels like her father is with her again, asking his penetrating questions. In her classes, she rhapsodizes about the wonder of trees.
Patricia’s character is based on two real-life figures. One is Suzanne Simard, who made important discoveries about how trees communicate with one another, similar to what Patricia does here. Essentially, she is examining the various gases and compounds that trees release. Like Powers’s project in The Overstory itself, Patricia’s character mingles the scientific study of trees with a poetic sense of wonder and beauty.
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Patricia earns her doctorate and starts going by “Dr. Pat Westerford” in an attempt to disguise her gender in writing. She becomes an adjunct professor in Madison, Wisconsin, and has lots of free time to continue her research. She studies sugar maples in a forest outside town, still collecting her bags of gas and analyzing them.
Patricia is still happy to live outside of regular society, and she finds her greatest joy in patient, attentive work among the trees. Here, Powers also briefly touches on the gender dynamics of her work, as she must downplay her femininity in order to be respected.
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One day Patricia finds that one of her bagged trees is being attacked by insects. At first, she thinks her data is ruined, but after studying her samples she has an extraordinary revelation. She repeats the experiment several times before she allows herself to really believe what she’s seeing: that trees actually warn each other about possible threats. They release signals through the compounds they emit, protecting each other. When the data finally confirms this, Patricia starts to weep, feeling that she has glimpsed an entirely new aspect of life on Earth.
This is Patricia’s great breakthrough, confirming what she has long suspected: that trees actively communicate with one another, living as social creatures who seek to protect each other from harm. This scientific discovery makes Patricia weep, as she feels that an entire new side to life itself has finally been revealed—that we are surrounded by conscious beings who are communicating with one another, and perhaps with us as well.
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Quotes
Patricia writes up her results, trying to use strictly scientific language and to focus on the data. Her paper is published in a scientific journal and then picked up by the press, and other papers run headlines about trees talking to one another. A few months later, the journal that originally published her paper runs a letter signed by three famous dendrologists. These men mock Patricia’s findings and conclusion. They also only refer to her as “Patricia” and never use the word “doctor” except in describing themselves. After the letter runs, Patricia stops getting asked for interviews, and other papers publicize her supposed debunking.
Dendrology is the scientific study of trees. In writing her paper, Patricia recognizes how many scientists distrust any kind of emotion or speculation—though The Overstory seems to advocate for a more holistic approach. Patricia’s study challenges the majority’s opinion, and they respond by cutting her down, not even addressing her data and weaponizing her gender to make her seem like a less respectable scientist.
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In the aftermath, Patricia isn’t renewed for her position at Madison, and she can’t find other work anywhere. Some friends sympathize with her, but no one publicly defends her work. She starts substitute teaching at high schools and grows dangerously depressed. Six months later, Patricia forages some deadly “Destroying Angel” mushrooms and cooks them into a gourmet meal for herself. She imagines that people will assume her death was an accident, as people die every year from consuming the wrong mushrooms.
After the breakthrough that brought her so much joy, Patricia’s career is suddenly ruined by the words of a few men. This dark passage shows that Patricia is also prone to depression and even suicidal ideation, as she feels that her life’s work has been in vain.
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Ready to eat her deadly meal, Patricia lifts a fork to her mouth and then feels her body flooded with signals, saying “Not this.” She drops her fork, experiencing a sudden clarity, and throws out her suicidal dinner. After this, she feels a new sense of freedom, like she has escaped the need for acceptance from other people and is now ready to discover anything.
Like other characters in The Overstory, Patricia seems to receive a direct signal from something non-human. Even as one of the most science-oriented characters, she also has access to the spiritual aspect of a positive relationship with trees. This near-death experience also makes her feel free from the herd mentality that is elsewhere described as being so powerful in people—the need to be accepted and affirmed by one’s larger group.
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Patricia then spends a few years outside of academia, working odd jobs and traveling. To others it seems like she is aimless and struggling, but really, she is busy “learning a foreign language.” She spends all her free time in the woods, just observing, sketching, and taking notes, reading John Muir and Henry David Thoreau, and foraging for her own food. She makes her way west, at peace with herself and forgiving the people who destroyed her career because of their own fear of wildness.
Freed from ideas of what her career path should be, Patricia is now able to move at her own pace with her work and life. She mingles art and literature with her scientific study, which the book suggests can be a more effective way of truly understanding forests than solely relying on hard data. Patricia also thinks of trees as speaking their own “foreign language,” one that she must slowly try to learn.
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Patricia visits an aspen grove in Utah and stands weeping beneath the beautiful golden leaves, thinking about aspens throughout history. She finds a part of the grove where someone has been “improving things”—that is, chopping down trees—and she estimates that some of the downed trunks were 80 years old; yet she knows that they are not separate trees at all. She has come to this place because what seems to be an aspen forest is actually one single organism, a clone colony thousands of years old and hundreds of acres wide. She can hardly wrap her mind around it.
The Overstory introduces many facts about trees that readers might not be familiar with, including describing this ancient aspen clone colony (which is called Pando and is located in south-central Utah) that is one of the largest and oldest organisms in the world. The image of the clone colony also fits with The Overstory’s themes of branching, complexity, and interdependence, as the organism separates and renews itself through new trees on the surface while remaining connected at its core deep beneath the earth.
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The narrative then briefly touches on Mimi Ma, Nicholas Hoel, Douglas Pavlicek, Dorothy Cazaly and Ray Brinkman, and Neelay Mehta, all spread across the country at that moment and involved in their own lives. None of them yet know each other, but the narrator notes that “their lives have long been connected, deep underground.” There is then an excerpt from the book that Patricia has yet to write: its opening passage is about how humans and trees share a single common ancestor from billions of years ago.
Here, the book makes a direct connection between the aspen clone colony and the characters of The Overstory. Each of these people is an individual following their own independent storyline, but they are also bound together and dependent on one another. This idea is then repeated again in the image of the Tree of Life, where trees and humans split apart long ago but share a common root in the past.
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Quotes
Still in the aspen grove, Patricia recognizes that the clone colony is slowly migrating to adapt to the changing climate. Looking around to see where it might go, she sees a new housing development cut into the heart of the trees. Patricia feels the weight of this impending tragedy and considers the war between humans and trees all over the world. She already knows “which side will lose by winning.”
Patricia can see the trees moving at their own pace, but it is far too slow to keep up with the rate of human growth. She also recognizes that for humanity to win this kind of race against nature will eventually mean our own destruction—we are the side that will “lose by winning.”
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Patricia eventually makes her way to the Pacific Northwest, where she first encounters an old-growth forest of conifers. She is floored by their size, “lost in reason’s opposite.” She wanders the forest, examining dead logs that are teeming with tiny creatures. She feels overwhelmed in the presence of so much life and death coexisting at once. She can understand why her old forestry professors would find such a place “decadent” and want it to be cleaned up, as all the decomposition thick around makes her feel like she’s in the frightening part of a fairy tale. Humans will always fear decay, she thinks. She continues through the forest, stopping at a cedar tree and thanking it out loud for all the things its wood can build, and all the gifts it has given.
This important passage acknowledges that it is a natural part of human psychology to fear death, decay, and chaos, and that this is linked to forestry’s desire to clean up old-growth forests and make them seem more manageable. We simply cannot comprehend all the complex process at work there, and so it is natural to try and simplify things. This passage also links the imagery of the old-growth forest to mythology and fairy tales, like the Ovid myths that Patricia loved as a child. Once again, Patricia mixes the scientific study of trees with a spiritual and emotional connection to them (“reason’s opposite”), as she thanks the forest aloud for all that it has given to humanity.
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Patricia starts working for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), living in a sparse cabin and spending her days cleaning up trash and tending to the forests. She loves everything about the work and the simple lifestyle, and she stays for 11 happy months. Back in the human world, however, a new paper is published in a famous scientific journal echoing her original findings about how trees communicate with each other. The paper cites her original research and reproduces her findings in new places.
As usual, Patricia is perfectly happy to live apart from other people, do repetitive work, and spend all her time in the forest. While her life has shifted to the natural rhythms of her surroundings, however, the human world continues on at breakneck speed, and her research returns to the public eye.
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One day, Patricia is out in the woods when she comes across two researchers. She watches them from a distance as one of the men summons an owl with his own imitation of its call. They photograph the bird and then disappear. Three weeks later, she finds the researchers again, this time examining beetles in a fallen log. They speak to her, and together they commiserate about the old forestry belief that fallen trunks should all be cleared away for a forests’ health.
Ever since her career’s downfall, Patricia has been very wary of other people, particularly other scientists, but she finds an immediate camaraderie with these two. They clearly share her respect for all living things as well as her scorn for the forestry beliefs that she was first taught.
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The men discuss their research, which is essentially studying all the life within a dead log, and then the older man sees Patricia’s name tag and calls her “Dr. Westerford.” He says that he saw her speak years ago, and he’s glad that she has now been vindicated. Patricia clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Introducing himself as Henry and his companion as Jason, the man invites Patricia back to their research station to talk.
The men share Patricia’s belief in the importance of the slow processes of decay and rebirth that are essential to an old-growth forest—the antithesis of the beliefs she once fought against. The fact that they recognize Patricia’s name suggests that something major has changed in the scientific world that she has tried to leave behind.
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Soon after, Patricia is working with Henry Fallows, Jason, and several other researchers in the Cascades, where she finally feels part of a true community. Henry is the senior scientist, and he puts her on a grant. She lives in a trailer and has access to a mobile lab and spends two happy years working. Meanwhile, her reputation in the wider scientific community has been totally rehabilitated, and scientists everywhere continue to build on her work. Patricia doesn’t care about this, though, and she prefers her life working in the forest, surrounded by all the plants and animals she loves.
This is a truly happy time in Patricia’s life, as she is able to continue her scientific work and solitary life but also finds a small community of people that she actually feels a connection to. If other characters in The Overstory must learn to look beyond humanity and see trees as fellow intelligent beings, Patricia must finally come to love humanity as she already loves the forests.
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Patricia’s colleagues continue making new discoveries that confirm her intuitions and are radically different from the way humans usually think about trees. The old-growth forest they study is like a huge, complex, symbiotic organism, with each part partnering with every other part. Patricia herself now focuses on studying Douglas-firs. She finds that when the roots of two Douglas-firs contact each other underground, they graft together and join their vascular systems, sharing nutrients and essentially becoming a single tree. Patricia starts to think that nature isn’t just about fighting each other to survive. Instead, trees all seem to live by cooperation and sharing.
These passages are some of the most important in presenting The Overstory’s idea of trees and forests as symbiotic, interconnected organisms that communicate and share resources. The usual human view of nature is of a constant competition for survival—but the world that starts to take shape through Patricia and her colleagues’ studies suggests an entirely different way of life, one playing out slowly and silently but based in cooperation, redistribution, and interdependence. This, the book implies, would be a much healthier system for people to live by.
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Henry Fallows wants Patricia to come back with them and teach at Corvallis, but she says she isn’t ready yet. Meanwhile Dennis Ward, the research station manager, brings Patricia little gifts whenever he comes by. She grows fond of him and his visits, and she likes that he respects her privacy and solitude.
Patricia has a found a community that she loves, but she still isn’t ready to face the wider world that once brought her to the brink of suicide. Dennis seems to understand Patricia implicitly and to move at a similar pace as she does.
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One night Dennis brings Patricia a foraged dinner and asks her questions about her work. After dinner, they take their usual walk. Dennis talks to Patricia about what a happy, self-reliant person she is, but he says that it’s also nice to cook for her sometimes. He then asks if they could have an arrangement: keep their separate places but still see each other like they already do. Patricia is frightened at first, but then the offer suddenly seems both inevitable and comforting, and she can’t believe her luck to find a relationship like this. Dennis says that he would like to make the marriage official, though, just so she could get his pension when he dies. Patricia takes his hand in the dark, feeling like a tree at last finding the root of another tree to bond with deep underground.
Dennis is a perfect match for Patricia, both in his great kindness and love for the forest and because he respects her work and solitude. Finally letting herself truly open up to someone romantically, Patricia immediately makes a connection with her beloved trees, feeling like a Douglas-fir connecting with its fellow tree—bound together and cooperating at the roots, but maintaining their separate trunks and branches above the soil.
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