The Hoel family chestnut tree symbolizes the passage of time; humanity’s destructive power against nature; and the potential for storytelling and art to make a positive change in the world.
When Jørgen Hoel moves from Brooklyn to Iowa to start a family in the mid-1800s, he brings six chestnut seeds with him and plants them in his new home. Years later, only one has survived, but it continues to grow and thrive until the tree is a landmark known for miles around. In the meantime, a blight brought from imported trees wipes out billions of chestnuts in their natural range along the American East Coast. After Jørgen’s death, his adult son John buys an early camera and starts photographing the tree from the same position once every month. John continues this ritual for his entire life, and so does his son after him. In the book’s present day, Nick Hoel is fascinated by the book of photographs, which show the chestnut tree’s growth over the course of decades through just a flip of its pages.
Most importantly, the tree—and the photographs of it—show how time passes differently for trees and for humans. Though a tree seems stationary and lifeless from a human point of view, the photo book allows people to see time from a tree’s perspective, visually portraying its growth and movement at a rate that we can actually understand. This is an early symbol of The Overstory’s larger point that trees have intelligence and purpose of their own; they just move through time in a different way than humans do. Looking through the photos doesn’t really give someone like Nick the full experience of living like a tree does, but it can help put this experience in human terms.
At the same time, the chestnut blight—which eventually reaches even the Hoel chestnut and kills it, though it is hundreds of miles outside of its native range—shows how human interference can be extremely destructive to the balance of nature. While the blight is not an example of purposeful destruction, it is entirely a product of human activity, in this case shipping in chestnut trees from Southeast Asia for commercial purposes. The tree’s fate shows how shortsighted greed can have devastating and long-lasting effects beyond humanity’s immediate desire for growth and profit.
Finally, the book of photographs of the Hoel chestnut represents the power of art to change people for the better. Nick is inspired by the photographs at a young age, and he incorporates the image of the chestnut into his artistic work later in life, both before and after his involvement with the other characters and their environmental activism. Having this visual representation of time as a tree sees it, the book suggests, can help people step outside of their own perspectives and consider other kinds of life as being just as valuable as their own.
The Hoel Chestnut Tree Quotes in The Overstory
The generations of grudge, courage, forbearance, and surprise generosity: everything a human being might call the story happens outside his photos’ frame. Inside the frame, through hundreds of revolving seasons, there is only that solo tree, its fissured bark spiraling upward into early middle age, growing at the speed of wood.
On his fourth night in the cell, Nick dreams about the Hoel family chestnut. He watches it, sped up thirty-two million times, reveal again its invisible plan. He remembers, in his sleep, on the cot's thin mattress, the way the time-lapse tree waved its swelling arms. The way those arms tested, explored, aligned in the light, writing messages in the air. In that dream, the trees laugh at them. Save us? What a human thing to do. Even the laugh takes years.
“How long can it last?”
“Not long,” he promises.
She claws at him, an animal falling from a great height. Then she calms again. “But not this? This will never end—what we have. Right?”
He waits too long, and time replies for him. She struggles for a few seconds to hear the answer, before softening into whatever happens next.
Although he should just shut up, so much time has passed since Nick has had the luxury of saying anything to anyone that he can't resist. His hand goes out, gesturing toward the conifers. "It amazes me how much they say, when you let them. They're not that hard to hear."
The man chuckles. "We've been trying to tell you that since 1492."
The man has jerked meat. Nick doles out the last of his fruit and nuts. "I'm going to have to think about restocking soon."
For some reason, his colleague finds this funny, too. The man swivels his head around the woods as if there were forage everywhere. As if people could live here, and die, with just a little looking and listening. From nowhere, in a heartbeat, Nick understands what Maidenhair's voices must always have meant. The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help.
Not them; us. Help from all quarters.