The Overstory: Part 3: Crown Summary & Analysis

An unnamed man in the far North lies with his head sticking out of his tent, looking up at the tops of five white spruce trees. He thinks about all the messages the trees are constantly sending out, and he can even sense some of them himself, from these spruces and others all through the valley where he is camping. The man rolls over, still communing with the trees, who seem to subvert his sense of despair. The man wishes that he himself were more like a tree, and that slow growth and light, water, and soil would be all that he needed in life.

The narrative jumps to 20 years after Olivia’s death but describes the group’s memories of that night. Nick collapses, and the others place Olivia’s body in the flames. They have to force Nick into the van, and then they flee the scene. As they drive Adam and Nick argue, and Douglas suggests that they surrender themselves. Adam insists that they all keep quiet. Back in Portland, the group disperses.

Nick immediately returns to Mimas and camps atop its stump, longing for Olivia and the life they shared in the redwood’s branches. Mimi and Douglas strip down and deep clean the van they used for the mission, and then sell it. Mimi also puts her condo up for sale, and tells Douglas that they can’t see each other anymore, as they’ll give each other away if they do.

Investigators find Olivia’s bones among the ashes, and what would have been a mundane crime becomes a major story. The police can’t identify her body, and the only clues are Nick’s cryptic painted words on the side of the trailer. Most people decide that the tragedy is the work of a “deranged killer.”

Adam returns to Santa Cruz, knowing that doing otherwise would only seem suspicious. He hides away in his sublet apartment, riding out waves of excitement and anxiety. Sneaking into his department to get his mail one night, he is confronted by a fellow student, who playfully asks him about his absence. Adam tries to use all his knowledge of psychology to best deceive her, and so instead of fleeing he invites her out to eat. The narrator notes that using these same tactics, in 20 years he will be a tenured professor and famous in his field.

Nick knows that he can’t stay in the area, but he still feels the need to wait for some kind of message from Olivia. He rents a cabin at the foot of the logged mountains, where he and Olivia lived atop Mimas, and lives there in total isolation. One day, after a downpour, a landslide comes down the mountain. Nick manages to escape in time, but his cabin is flooded with earth, and his neighbors are only saved by a thin row of redwood trees that stop the avalanche. One of Nick’s neighbors points to the trees that just saved their lives—they are all marked with X’s, meaning they are slated to be cut down next.

Douglas keeps returning to Mimi’s condo, no matter how often she tells him to stay away. He has a recurring dream of Olivia telling them that everything will be okay, and he feels the need to tell Mimi about it. Finally, she tells him that she is selling her condo and leaving, and that he needs to disappear too. Douglas is shocked, and that night he dreams again of Olivia. The next morning, he goes to tell Mimi about his dream once more, only to find her condo sold and vacated.

Without Mimi, Douglas feels totally aimless. He abandons his job at the hardware store, loads his possessions into his truck, and starts driving east. When he makes it to Idaho that night, he feels a need to see the site of Olivia’s death. He knows this is a bad idea, but he can’t help himself. As he approaches, he sees construction work going on—nothing has been changed by the fire. Douglas lingers for only a few seconds and then drives on. He passes into Montana and sleeps in his car that night.

The next day, Douglas keeps driving at random, generally headed east. He stops at a grove of trees that seems to emerge in the middle of nowhere. As he explores the area, he realizes that it used to be a town. Now nothing is left of its buildings, but the trees planted by the people who lived there remain.

Mimi gets her father Winston’s arhat scroll appraised by an art gallery run by a man named Mr. Siang. He has had the scroll for weeks, and now he is late to his meeting with Mimi. At last, he appears and leads her to a back room. As Mr. Siang talks about the scroll, Mimi worries that getting it appraised was a bad idea. Then he tells her what the ancient inscription says: it is a poem about three trees. Mimi suddenly gets goosebumps, remembering her father’s words, which she now realizes were echoes of this poem—though Mr. Siang says only a scholar or calligraphy student would be able to read it.

Mr. Siang finally puts a price on the scroll: a figure much higher than Mimi was expecting. She meets his gaze and holds it—after experiencing Olivia’s dying stare, she is an expert at eye contact. After only a few seconds, Mimi realizes that Mr. Siang is underselling her, and he has discovered that the scroll is a “long-lost national treasure.” She offers to take the scroll to a museum instead, and Mr. Siang immediately offers a much higher sum, enough to ensure financial security for Mimi, her sisters, and their children.

Mimi calls Carmen and Amelia to ask their opinions on selling the scroll. She says nothing about losing her job, moving, or the scar on her face, saying only that she “hit a rough patch.” Carmen suggests that they keep the scroll, just like Winston did, as a family heirloom. Amelia says to not get sentimental about it, and to go ahead and sell it. That night Mimi seems to hear her father’s voice telling her to prune the past like a tree so that it might grow.

In the Brinkman house, Dorothy now tends to Ray every day. He lies in a mechanical bed, only his eyes moving, barely able to make noises. Dorothy uses her acting skills to seem exaggeratedly cheerful as she feeds and cleans him, all while trying to interpret what he might be saying with his eyes. She initially thought she could never live like this, but weeks have passed, and she has settled into a routine.

Today Dorothy starts to read the newspaper aloud to Ray, but he seems agitated. Then he manages to make two sounds that she can interpret: “crossword,” his morning ritual for years. Dorothy gets the crossword, reads the clues aloud to him, and tries to interpret his noises and eye movements. One of the clues she gets stuck on is “Bud’s comforting comeback?” Later she serves him lunch, which is always an arduous event, and then reads to him. After his dinner, she finally goes out to have her own meal with Alan, the man she’s now engaged to.

Dorothy returns to Ray two hours later. She expects to find him sleeping, but instead he grabs at her and tries to speak. At last, she realizes that he’s asking to write something down, and she gives him a pen and paper. Very slowly he scrawls out a word: “releaf.” Dorothy is confused at first, but then realizes that it’s the answer to the crossword clue she was stuck on earlier—“bud’s comforting comeback.”

The narrative briefly touches on Patricia, Douglas, Nick, Adam, and Mimi as 20 years go by. Patricia continues to write as more species go extinct, and Nick “hides and works.” Time keeps passing, but as Adam proves in one of his studies, humans cannot see “slow, background change, when something bright and colorful is waving in our faces.”

Neelay is now playing Mastery 8, experiencing the world anonymously among the millions of other players. At a market exchange within the game, Neelay’s avatar encounters another player who is mocking everyone. The man complains that he used to love Mastery, but now it has become just like real life—all about building, competing, and spending money. Despite Neelay’s protests, the man claims that Mastery has a “Midas problem”—all it can do is endlessly grow until it fills up. Neelay can tell that the man is right.

Adam Appich is now about to become an associate professor in Ohio. One night while watching the news, he sees a report of an arson in Washington, accompanied by the words: “CONTROL KILLS; CONNECTION HEALS.” The newscaster says that investigators are linking the fire to other attacks from years ago, and Adam suddenly feels like he’s an arsonist again. He suspects that Nick or Douglas might be behind this new attack. The camera then pans to another spray-painted message: “NO TO THE SUICIDE ECONOMY.”

Three months later, there is another attack, accompanied by similar slogans. Mimi reads about it as she sits in a park in San Francisco, where she is now earning a degree in counseling. Reading the article and seeing the paper’s accompanying “Timeline of Ecological Terror,” Mimi feels sure that she will be arrested soon. Nevertheless, she continues on with the life she has now made for herself and heads to class.

Nick never hears about these new fires. He has recently found a job as a forklift operator at a massive book “Fulfillment Center” in Bellevue, Washington. Nick enjoys the hard and mindless work, though he knows he is working for a company that is preying on people’s endless desire for convenience, and that his job will soon be performed by machines. All around the world, new “Fulfillment Centers” spring up every month.

At night, Nick paints murals on bare walls around town. He knows that it’s risky to draw any kind of attention to himself, but he feels compelled to keep making art. Tonight’s project is painting an enormous chestnut tree on the side of a law office building. Next to it, he paints the words of a poem by Rumi—one that Olivia first read to him in the branches of Mimas.

Ray and Dorothy continue their routine. Ray frequently tries to tell Dorothy to leave him and go live her own life, but she either can’t understand him or pretends not to, and he also can’t help feeling happy every morning when she arrives. On this particular day, she feeds him and then turns on the news, which is showing footage of protesters clashing with police in Seattle.

Dorothy turns off the news and reads aloud to him, as is their usual routine. Over the years, they’ve been making their way through “The Hundred Greatest Novels of All Time.” Ray loves fiction now (though it used to make him impatient), but he has learned that all the novels share a single core: they assume that humanity and its character are all that matter in the universe. This, the narrator suggests, is why the world is failing—“because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.”

Ray drifts off to sleep and wakes to find Dorothy asleep as well. He looks out the window into the backyard, as he now does for most of each day. He can see all the trees that he and Dorothy have planted over the years and the creatures living among them. Living as he does, Ray has now slowed to the pace of the world outside his window, so that what was once happening too slowly for him to notice now seems dramatic and exciting. Dorothy wakes up and apologizes for abandoning Ray, but Ray now feels that no one can ever be abandoned—life is always occurring all around them.

The year 2000 arrives, and Douglas is living in a remote BLM (Bureau of Land Management) cabin in Montana. He is working as a caretaker for “the Friendliest Ghost Town in the West.” In the summer, he gives tours to the occasional visitors—but in the winter, he is snowed in and totally alone. To pass the time, he has been working on his own “Manifesto of Failure,” writing down the events of his life as a defender of trees. He doesn’t use anyone’s real name, only their tree-name aliases. He has just written about how it felt to watch a police officer wipe pepper spray into Mimi’s eyes.

Today Douglas writes about what he perceives as humanity’s mass blindness to the fact that “we’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on bling.” He thinks that it’s easy to recognize this truth while living alone in a cabin, but it seems insane when surrounded by other people going along with the status quo.

Douglas tends to his fire and then makes his usual rounds, walking through the snow in snowshoes and examining the buildings. Looking out over the forested valley below, he walks to the edge of a ridge and the ground suddenly collapses beneath him. Douglas tumbles downward, flying off the edge of a cliff and only saving himself by catching onto the trunk of a tree. He lies among the snowy branches for a while, his nose broken and his shoulder dislocated. He wants to give up and just fall asleep in the snow, but then he has a vision of Olivia telling him that he’s “not done yet.” He gets up and starts the long slog back.

Patricia is getting older, but she works harder than ever. She regularly travels around the country giving talks and asking for funding for her seed vault. She uses every tactic she can to convince her audiences that humanity’s current way of life is unsustainable. The other part of her job—the part she loves—is traveling the world and gathering seeds. Her actual vault is a bunker in Colorado filled with thousands of canisters, all kept at -20°. Inside the vault, Patricia can feel all the potential surrounding her, like the seeds themselves are singing. Reporters sometimes ask her why doesn’t focus on the most “useful” plants first, but she knows that “Useful is the catastrophe.”

Patricia visits the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and is overwhelmed by the sheer mass of life before her. She spends a week there taking a census of all the trees she can find, working long days but continuously awed by the diversity of life she finds. She is accompanied by a group of men who make their living harvesting from the rubber trees, including two named Elvis Antônio and Elizeu. They carry rifles, and at night tell stories about people they know who been killed in disputes over the rubber trees. Elvis Antônio and Elizeu “tap” the rubber—a sustainable practice that can last for generations—while others poach it, which kills the tree but makes more immediate profit.

While Patricia is camped out in the Amazon, Dennis is back in Colorado working at the vault. He hasn’t been quite convinced by Patricia’s project yet. She tells him about seeds that have germinated after thousands of years in the frost, but she knows that his real worry is that there will be no one around to plant her seeds in the future.

The next day in the Amazon, Patricia and her men come across a patch of forest that has recently been logged. The men are immediately on alert—there must be rubber poachers nearby. Patricia hears a gunshot and then a motorcycle driving away.

Later that same day, Elvis Antônio finds something extraordinary that he immediately shows to Patricia. It’s an enormous tree of a species unknown to Patricia, and its trunk has grown into a remarkable image of a human woman. Patricia knows that human brains naturally find patterns in random places, but she feels like the tree really does look exactly like a woman, her branch arms uplifted to the sky. Walking around the tree-woman, Patricia remembers reading the myths of Ovid in her youth, and the stories about people turning into trees. She has found similar myths all around the world in her recent travels. Everyone gets out their cameras to take pictures of the tree.

When Patricia returns home, she doesn’t show the pictures of the tree-woman to any of her colleagues or staff, knowing that they are only concerned with data and have no interest in myth. She does show Dennis, however, and he is delighted by it. He suggests that Patricia should use the image to make posters. That night, Patricia wakes up to find Dennis slack and limp, and she turns on the light to see that he is dead.

More years of the same routine have passed: Dorothy tends to Ray day and night, only spending a few hours with her fiancé Alan. Finally, Alan grows impatient in his desire to get married and live together, but Dorothy is still unwilling to leave Ray. She knows that they were on the verge of a divorce before his aneurysm, but she still feels that she must keep her promise to take care of him now that he can’t sign any agreements or even talk. Faced with a choice to have Dorothy as she is now or not at all, Alan chooses to end their relationship. One morning afterward, Dorothy hears Ray crying out in the other room. She rushes in to see the news footage of planes striking the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and together they watch in horror.

Mimi Ma now lives in San Francisco and works as a therapist. Her reputation as an “unconventional” practitioner has grown quickly, and now she is usually fully booked. She only sees two clients a day, because the sessions take so much out of her. On this day, she sits recovering from her first client and preparing for her second. To calm herself, she looks at the old photo of her Chinese grandparents and thinks about her family and her own past. She is interrupted by the sound of a chime—it’s time for her next patient, whose name is Stephanie.

A red-haired woman enters, and Mimi makes sure that Stephanie has left all her electronic devices at the front desk and has already eaten and used the bathroom. Then she has Stephanie sit down. Stephanie wants to talk some first, but Mimi tells her that soon they’ll both know all they need to know without speaking. Mimi stares into Stephanie’s eyes, and tells her to just keep their gazes locked. This is very uncomfortable at first, but Mimi and Stephanie already seem to be sending messages between them with only their eyes.

Time passes as the women continue to stare into each other’s eyes in silence. In their internal dialogue with each other, Stephanie first seems friendly and easy-going, then defensive. Mimi, meanwhile, reveals her real name—she’s changed her name to “Judith Hanson” since moving. Stephanie continues with her therapy, all while staring into Mimi’s eyes: she remembers her high-school girlfriend, a fight with her mother, and then her mother’s death.

Mimi then seems to let Stephanie into her own memories, showing her family and their mulberry tree. After half an hour, they are both revealing secrets to each other, and two hours later their most terrible secrets of all. Finally, both of them start crying. Stephanie asks what’s wrong with her, and Mimi says (still in their silent dialogue) that she is mourning something that she doesn’t even know she has lost: “a great, spoked, wild, woven-together place beyond replacing.”

Stephanie jumps up and hugs Mimi, crying, and when she recovers enough, she leaves the office. Out on the street, Stephanie feels entirely changed and tries to remember everything she has just learned, but the feeling quickly fades as she is distracted by the noise of the city and the “irresistible force of other people.” Then a tree branch scrapes her cheek, and again she remembers.

Nicholas Hoel drives through Iowa on his way to his family’s old farm. When he reaches it, he sees that the farm is now a factory. The chestnut tree is gone. Nick parks his car and approaches the dead stump, forgetting that he no longer owns this land. From the stump’s base he sees dozens of new chestnut shoots sprouting up; the sight makes him hopeful, but then he remembers that these trees too will inevitably be struck by the blight. The house is still there, though it’s fallen into disrepair and no one is living there. He looks into the windows and considers breaking in just to sleep in a bed, but instead he just sits on the porch and waits.

When the sun starts to set, Nick gets a shovel from his car and finds the place where he and Olivia buried his art. He unearths the carton and opens it, looking at his old paintings of trees. Seeing them reminds him of Olivia, and he thinks of how hopeful and whole they felt when they first met. Now that she’s dead, Nick is “sleepwalking” again, and nothing they did has stopped the cutting of trees all over the world. Nick digs up another box and finds what he is really looking for: the book of photos of the Hoel chestnut tree.

Nick loads half of the art into his car, but as he returns for the rest, he sees a police car approaching. The car pulls up and a voice orders Nick to get down on the ground. The cops immediately handcuff him. Nick is worried that they’ll run his fingerprints, but when they see that he only has homemade art with him, they call the manager of the property and then let him get the rest of the art—including the chestnut photo book—and leave.

At his office in California, Neelay calls a meeting with his five top project managers: Nguyen, Rasha, Kaltov, Boehm, and Robinson. All of them are dressed like teenagers, and they’re all millionaires now, thanks to Neelay. Neelay lays out what he sees as the problem at the core of Mastery—its “Midas problem.” The others object, giving examples of how incredibly successful the games and the company have been. Boehm suggests adding new technologies and a new continent to Mastery’s world, but Neelay says that this just feels like postponing the problem.

Neelay presents the issue as a disconnect between the Earth itself (a massive living biome of infinite complexity) and the game (a series of flashing pixels on a screen). Neelay then holds up a book: The Secret Forest. The others start arguing with Neelay, trying to come up with ideas to avert what they see as his final point. They feel that Neelay is going to destroy the company, and with it their own wealth and success. Neelay reads a passage from The Secret Forest and then lays out his plan; he wants a new game that is about “growing the world, instead of yourself.” Neelay goes around the room, and everyone else votes no on the idea. Neelay realizes that he has lost control of his own creation.

Ten years have passed since Douglas’s fall on the mountainside. He still lives in his same cabin and now regales tourists with an exaggerated tale of his adventure. One particular woman, an Eastern European backpacker named Alena, seems extremely interested in his story. She stays behind after everyone else leaves and asks Douglas if he has anything to eat or knows of a place to camp. Soon she is in his cabin flirting with him, and then she starts to kiss him. Douglas finds himself crying as she touches him. She lets go, saying that he is a strange old man.

Douglas apologizes and offers to let Alena sleep in his bed, while he’ll sleep in the other room on the floor. Alena seems excited by this offer, and Douglas notes that her light is still on late that night—he assumes that she’s reading. Two months later, Douglas has already forgotten about her—but he remembers when federal agents arrive, tear up his cabin, and find his journal. Douglas is arrested and feels like he has become “Prisoner 571” all over again. His journal is essentially a confession, but the investigators now want the real names of his associates.

More years have passed, and Dorothy brings Ray his breakfast as she does every morning. Today he seems preoccupied, and he slowly asks Dorothy about a tree in their backyard. Dorothy returns to their old library, filled with all the guidebooks for adventures they once planned to have and finds a tree identification book. She opens the book and finds a handwritten poem from Ray. She brings him the book and starts flipping through it, explaining all her thoughts aloud as she goes through the steps of identifying the particular tree that Ray asked about.

The process takes Dorothy several trips back and forth between the room and the backyard to examine the tree’s needles and cones. At last, she has an answer: eastern white pine. By now Dorothy can essentially read Ray’s thoughts through his eyes and movements, and she can tell that he’s thinking “A good day’s work.” That night Dorothy reads to Ray all about the pine and its history of use around the world. A storm picks up outside, and the Brinkmans feel like they, too, are alone in wilderness, just like the early settlers they read about. Ray thinks about all the old forests that are now gone.

Even after Dennis’s death, Patricia still speaks aloud to him as she writes alone in her cabin at night. She is finishing a new book, a shorter work that is also rather bleak. She has tried to be optimistic about the forests’ chances of survival, including stories of her own favorite trees, but she can’t escape what she believes to be the inevitable. She keeps returning to one particular passage about how trees can sense that humans are near and pump out certain chemicals. They’ve always been trying to talk to us, she writes, just in “frequencies too low for people to hear.”

Just before mailing off her draft to the editor, Patricia revises her final sentence. The book was going to end on her hope that her seed vault would allow future people to plant the seeds someday. Now she adds: “If not, other experiments will go on running themselves, long after people are gone.” Patricia then gets in bed and reads, finishing with the same Wang Wei poem that Winston Ma left behind after his suicide. Patricia says goodnight to Dennis and falls asleep.

Adam is in New York, where a rapidly growing movement opposing the corruption of the wealthy has risen up. Adam wanders among the protesters as they chant, sing, and offer various services for free. Adam comes across a free “People’s Library” and looks through it, finding his childhood favorite: The Golden Guide to Insects. Flipping through it takes him back to his youth and his first fascination with observation and study.

As the crowd chants the word “Occupy!” Adam recognizes a familiar face. Doug-fir and Maple greet each other and embrace, though seeing Douglas immediately makes Adam feel like an arsonist and murderer again. They start to walk together, briefly catching up on the past decades. As they walk, Douglas, who keeps fiddling with his baseball cap, says he hasn’t seen anyone in the group since the accident, but Adam says that he feels like he keeps seeing Watchman’s art everywhere.

Douglas asks about Adam’s research, and Adam says that he is essentially studying what “keeps us from seeing the obvious”—and the answer is usually just being around other people. They also both consider the other side of the equation—why some people are able to see the obvious, despite society’s conditioning. Douglas then brings the conversation to their activist days, and Adam admits aloud that they set buildings on fire thinking that they were the only ones who could see the truth and save humanity from destruction. They ask each other if they would do it all over again, and Adam says that none of it makes up for Olivia’s death.

Douglas accuses Adam of being in love with Olivia, and Adam admits that he probably was. Douglas then asks Adam why he came back that night instead of going for help. Adam gets angry and says that he was doing what was best—if he’d gone to the police, she still would have died, but they’d all be in prison too. Parting ways, the men hug, but it’s more like a test of strength than a show of affection.

Neelay sits in the terrarium at Stanford’s inner quad, the site of his first inspiration, but the trees now refuse to speak to him. He feels alone and considers calling his mother, who is now dying as well, but decides not to. His phone buzzes—a message from his own personal artificial intelligence. He helped to make this bot, and now it scans the world for anything associated with his latest obsession: The Secret Forest and its ideas about tree communication and “forest intelligence.”

Neelay opens the latest message from his bot, which is a video called “Words of Air and Light.” The video shows a hundred years of a chestnut tree’s growth over the course of twenty seconds. Neelay is fascinated by the sense of purpose in the tree’s growth and branching, and he watches the video again. Following the last frame of the chestnut tree, the screen shows a Transcendentalist poem. Afterward, Neelay himself feels transcendent.

Now living in the Great Smoky Mountains, Patricia receives an invitation from Stanford to speak at a conference called “Home Repair: Countering a Warming World.” Patricia is immediately opposed to the idea, knowing that what these people want is some new technological breakthrough or ingenious idea, but when she looks at the guest list—scientific luminaries, writers, venture capitalists—she realizes that she’ll never have an opportunity like this again. She doesn’t reply yet and instead takes an evening walk through the woods. She feels clearer and better among the trees and animals, and she places her bare feet in a stream. In her mind, she asks Dennis if she should do the “Home Repair” talk, but she already knows that she must.

Adam is now at his university and giving a lecture when he sees three armed FBI agents appear in the back of his classroom. The men make their presence known but also don’t disrupt the class, and Adam knows he must finish his lecture. Though he has dreaded this moment for years, he also finds a kind of relief that it has finally arrived. Adam, who has won multiple awards for his teaching and his research, realizes what really happened during his meeting with Douglas, and the reason for Douglas’s constant fiddling with his hat; Adam was recorded confessing to their crimes.

Adam delivers a statement to his class: “You can’t see what you don’t understand. But what you think you already understand, you’ll fail to notice.” After a few more remarks Adam dismisses the class and walks up to shake hands with the FBI agents. They arrest him and lead him away, as his students watch in shock.

As the agents lead Adam toward the car, he smells something both rancid and familiar. From inside the car, he looks out the window and sees a tree: the prehistoric gingko tree, or “maidenhair.” All its leaves drop at once as the car drives Adam away.

Ray and Dorothy now have a new daily game: Dorothy brings in various leaves, seeds, and twigs from trees, and then together (with Dorothy reading aloud) they identify the trees that they came from. One day Dorothy feels that they must have made a mistake—they’ve identified one of the trees in their yard as an American chestnut, but they are far outside of its native range and there aren’t supposed to be many mature chestnuts remaining.

Dorothy finds The Secret Forest at the library and slowly reads it aloud to Ray, taking an entire day for only a page or two. They sit together quietly, just looking at their backyard and finally appreciating it. Watching nature unfold, Dorothy feels the same sense of drama that she once did when reading Victorian novels. As she’s about to read more, Ray slowly speaks, telling a story in the few words he can manage: he says that their own daughter planted the chestnut tree from a seedling on their windowsill.

Patricia goes through airport security on her way to California and is questioned about her sample collecting kit and a jar of liquid in her bag. Patricia is particularly nervous about the liquid, but she says that it’s just vegetable broth, and the agent throws it out. On the plane, she reviews her speech, knowing that this one is too important to improvise.

At the San Francisco airport Patricia is supposed to be met by a driver, but she doesn’t see anyone holding up her name. She sits down in the corner, overwhelmed by the constant flow of human activity. She spots several house sparrows flying around inside the building and crumbles up a piece of bread onto the seat next to her. The sparrows approach and gradually grow bold enough to eat, and Patricia sees that they are wearing ankle bracelets reading “Illegal alien.” Patricia laughs at this.

Patricia’s driver finally finds her and is incredulous that she doesn’t have her phone on (Patricia doesn’t even have a cell phone) and has packed so little for a three-day trip. Slowly they make their way through traffic to Patricia’s lodging at Stanford. Patricia then spends the afternoon wandering through the campus terrarium, marveling at the variety of trees and collecting extracts to replace those that the TSA confiscated. Standing amid the alien-seeming trees, Patricia stands and listens to them “whispering to each other.”

Adam is placed in a cell and processed. All his family members are dead now except for his brother Emmett, whom he doesn’t speak to anyway after Emmett stole his inheritance. The only people he has to tell about his arrest are his wife Lois and their young son Charlie. Adam calls Lois, who first thinks he is joking when he explains where he is. Once she accepts the truth, she immediately takes action to find lawyers and try to get him out, assuming that he must be innocent. She visits Adam in prison, and he tries to tell her what happened, but she hushes him and assures that she knows he could never do the kinds of things he’s accused of.

Douglas is in his own prison cell across town. Every night, he closes his eyes and tries to find Mimi in his mind, to explain to her what he did and why he did it. He knows she’ll find out that he betrayed Adam, but he wants her to know why. Douglas remembers his questioning: the agents said they had all the information they needed and knew who all his accomplices were—they just needed him to identify them. However, some of the pictures they showed him were of people he had never seen before, and he had never heard of some of the arsons they were investigating.

After two days of silence, Douglas’s captors told him that if he confirmed the face of just one co-conspirator, he could have a reduced sentence, and they would close the case on any fires he admitted to. Douglas thought about this—he knows he won’t last long in prison no matter how long his sentence, but he wanted to save Mimi at whatever cost. Then he saw the investigators’ picture of Adam, whom Douglas always felt was like an outsider to the rest of them, and who had refused to go get help when Olivia was dying. Douglas then decided to identify Adam as “Maple.” This is the message Douglas is now trying to send to Mimi—that he did what he did for her sake, and for Nick, and “maybe the trees.”

Patricia stands at the podium, ready to deliver her speech and looking out over the crowd. She begins, saying that though we’ve learned an incredible amount about the lives of trees in recent years, “our separation has grown faster than our connection.” She then shows various slides showing forest destruction over the years and quotes Rockefeller as saying that he always wanted “just a little bit more.” This, Patricia says, is the problem with humanity that is spelling doom for the planet.

Patricia pauses, suddenly very nervous, and pours some water into an empty glass on her podium. Then she takes out a vial of liquid, saying that it is composed of plant extracts that she found there on campus the day before. She places the vial on the podium and continues her speech, describing all the incredible chemistry that makes up trees, and then showing slides of some of the strangest and most incredible trees she knows of. She declares that forests have brains of their own, ones that scientists won’t let themselves see because humans only acknowledge intelligence as a human trait.

Patricia continues, veering from topic to topic, and she can tell that the audience is nervous about where she might be headed. She describes the wonder of “thinking green,” and says that if we truly could understand plants, we wouldn’t have to be at war with them; all our interests would be aligned. Then she describes a tree called the “suicide tree” that gives up its life to provide nutrients for its own seedlings. Patricia says she has tried to see the conference’s keynote question—“What is the single best thing a person can do for tomorrow’s world?”—from the perspective of the trees, rather than humanity. Then she pours the vial of extracts into the glass of water.

Meanwhile Adam is back in his apartment under house arrest, thanks to Lois’s efforts to get him out of jail. He has an ankle bracelet on and isn’t supposed to leave the house. His son Charlie is at Lois’s parents’ house because it distresses the boy to see Adam like this.

On the second day of his detention, Adam looks out the window to see a mural appearing on the street below. Cars drive by, drop pools of paint, and then drive through them to make streaks. Slowly an image of an enormous tree appears. Adam wonders why people would do this in his relatively out-of-the-way neighborhood, but then he realizes that they’re doing it for him. Adam goes downstairs and steps outside, wanting to show himself to the artists, but his ankle bracelet goes off and he returns to his apartment. When Lois comes home, she sees the mural and finally realizes that Adam might actually be guilty.

As she often does lately, Dorothy enters Ray’s room to find him enraptured by the view outside his window. She climbs into bed beside him, takes his hand, and looks out at the backyard, though she knows Ray is seeing much more than she is. Finally, Dorothy asks Ray: “tell me about her.” In a few words, Ray starts to describe their hypothetical daughter. This has been their game this winter, one that Dorothy knows is dangerously close to madness.

Together Ray and Dorothy think about their daughter and her life, silently envisioning her all through college, back to high school, back to planting the chestnut seedling with Ray as a child. Ray then says, “Do nothing […] no more mowing.” Dorothy remembers a passage from Patricia’s book saying that the best thing someone can do for the land is to do nothing at all—to just let it grow.

Adam decides to refuse to name anyone else involved in the arson, though doing so would considerably lighten his sentence. Lois argues with him about this, saying that their son Charlie needs a father as he grows up. Impatient, she asks if Adam would really put someone else’s well-being above his own son’s. Adam realizes that this is the heart of the problem—people are wired to always protect their own at the expense of everyone and everything else. Adam again refuses and Lois storms off, enraged.

That night Adam wakes up and sees a huge moon out the window shining down on Manhattan and the Hudson. He looks out over the street and is surprised to see wolves and deer running among the cars. The sight makes him jerk forward and he hits his head against the glass, then falling again and striking the windowsill. His mouth is bleeding now, but he gets up and looks out the window again to see that all the buildings of Manhattan are gone—instead there is just a vast forest, and the Milky Way above.

Adam knows that he must be hallucinating, but he can’t stop staring in awe at the massive trees of the forest. He can see owls, bears, and sea turtles all going about their business here on the island of “Mannahatta.” Adam pauses to check his mouth and sees that he has chipped a tooth in his fall. When he looks up again the vision is gone, replaced by the usual lights and movement of New York.

Mimi Ma is in the audience for Patricia’s speech. Mimi remembers reading her book with the others decades before, and Patricia seems very old to her now, but her speech has been piercing and clear. As Patricia nears the end and pours the vial into her glass of water, Mimi immediately knows what she means to do—it’s Patricia’s answer to the same drastic situation that led Mimi herself to arson. All around her, hundreds of people watch in disbelief as Patricia raises her glass, but no one moves or tries to stop her.

Patricia looks down and suddenly catches Mimi’s gaze. As she does in her therapy, Mimi immediately begins exchanging messages with Patricia through her eyes. Mimi begs her not to go through with her plan, but Patricia tells her that she’s thought it through, and that this will at least get people’s attention. Mimi tries to hold her gaze, but Patricia looks back up at the rest of her audience.

The narrative returns to Patricia’s point of view. She has one regret—she would have liked to see again the beech tree that she and her father planted, with its little notch four feet above the ground. Patricia raises her glass in a toast to the audience. Everyone is silent and still, but then someone starts shouting. A man in a wheelchair, thin and tall with a flowing beard and hair, rolls up the aisle toward her. Neelay’s shouts don’t make anyone else move, but Patricia feels as if time splits into two branches. Down one branch she toasts to the “suicide tree” and drinks. But down the other—the branch she actually follows—she shouts, “Here’s to unsuicide,” and tosses the cup out over the audience. Then she stumbles off the stage.

While Adam is finally brought to be tried in federal court, Dorothy, now almost 70 years old, looks out her window at the jungle that has appeared in their backyard. Saplings have popped up everywhere, and the grass is thick with weeds. The whole neighborhood hates them for this. People complain and offer to mow their lawn for free, and the city has written twice threatening a fine. She and Ray have decided to just keep paying the fines and let their little jungle grow. She’s amazed that a little wild greenness can be perceived as such a threat to society.

There is a knock on the door, and Dorothy opens it to see four young men unloading lawn equipment from a truck. One says that the city is offering to “clean up” her yard for free. Dorothy tells them not to, playing the part of the mad old lady who can’t be reasoned with, and the confused boys leave. Dorothy knows this is just a delay, but that she and Ray will outlast them. After lunch they work on the crossword and then sit in bed together, look at the trees, and think about their daughter.

At Adam’s trial, the prosecution shows pictures of the charred buildings and Nick’s painted words: “COME HOME OR DIE.” They argue that this means an attempt to intimidate the government, which means a charge of terrorism. Adam’s lawyers’ arguments are morally sound but the law itself is clear, and he is found guilty of domestic terrorism. The narrator notes that “the law is simply human will, written down,” and it is human will to destroy every forest, so Adam never stood a chance. When asked to deliver any final words to the court, Adam says, “Soon we’ll know if we were right or wrong.” He is given 140 years in prison.