FINAL DRAFT
The purpose of this research study is to understand how people experience trees spiritually, sensorily, and relationally. Utilizing a relational ontology allows me to challenge assumptions of who/what can be known, related to, or communicated. I am employing a qualitative, multispecies/multisensory ethnographic approach that centers the agency of trees and the presence of participants. In particular, I incorporated participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and reflexive fieldnotes that capture human stories and relationships with trees. Findings include spiritual connections, human attunement, and the benefits paired with memory and significance.
Introduction
When embarking on this project during the fall of 2025, I was enrolled in a class here at Knox, taught by Professor Hope. Our assignment was to create a presentation that related to our class in some manner. Thus, I decided to choose a topic that sounded appealing to me/ something that I've always enjoyed, which was nature. More specifically, trees. Nature has always been something that I've enjoyed. Trees, in particular, have always both excited me and grounded me. The thought of studying them through an educational lens was thrilling. That question how can trees fit into a five-sense framework? led me to discover a world of opportunity.
After initially discovering how trees can be interpreted through taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound. I began to understand how oblivious we are to our daily interactions we have with them. Here I began to think about trees and our five senses more, and how I could apply that to my everyday life. There were infinite ways to think about this. You can learn or experience so much with trees and our senses that people don't usually take the time to analyze them. Trees are a part of our everyday environment that we become desensitized to the ways they subtly influence our sensory experiences. The more I dug into it, the more I realized trees touch us in every sense of the word. From the feeling of rough bark crunching beneath your fingertips, to the smell of leaves after a rainfall, to the changing colors that signal a shift in season, to the sounds of branches brushing together like they're speaking their own language. What started as a small assignment for class turned into something that made me wonder about how trees connect with our bodies, our memories, and our emotions; oftentimes, without our knowledge. This is what sparked my interest in this research project.
In this reflective essay, I will take you through my research process, start to finish. We’ll begin with the preliminary research and ideas I conducted this past fall of 2025 and work our way to today. My current perspective is much more nuanced, knowledgeable, and deliberate than where I started. My research began as a simple assignment and evolved into a year‑long exploration that challenged me to view trees, humans’ senses, and how we interpret the natural world in new ways. During this time, I collected participant observations, conducted semi-structured interviews, documented my sensory methods, and circled back to my research questions many times over.
I want to organize my work chronologically to emphasize that my knowledge did not come to me immediately. It took trial and error, curiosity, and even some serendipity to fully understand my research. My preliminary work in the fall gave me a great starting point. I will discuss my first impressions of trees and the five human senses, initial research that inspired me, and my first steps in fieldwork and learning how to observe. As time progressed, I began to expand on my original notes.
Looking back now, a year later, I can see how each phase of this process offered up something vital. What I’ve learned is more than a pile of facts or amassed notes — it’s changed the way I see trees, and think about what it means to sense, feel, and relate to them. This final paper is my chance to outline that transformation: where I began and how I changed over time, leading me to where I stand now.
With this idea in mind, I then needed to develop it into an actionable research question. Trees stimulate our senses, yes, but what did that stimulation mean to people? With this question swirling in my mind, I started to zero in on a central research problem: how might we better understand the ways that people relate to trees, on spiritual, sensory, and emotional levels? This problem didn’t magically reveal itself in a flash of insight. It developed over time through interviews, literature, field notes, and endless moments of wondering why humans often related to trees in ways that seemed beneficial to ones well being.
My working question became the backbone of my project. It allowed me to delve into the works of other scholars, authors, and artists who had grappled with similar ideas: ideas like relational ontology, multispecies ethnography, anthropology of the senses, or the concept that nonhumans can enter into relation with humans. As I deep dived into their work, I began to understand how my personal experience and observation was just one piece of a giant puzzle around how we understand the more‑than‑human world. My research turned into a way to make sense of how humans perceive trees, and attempt to communicate with and learn from them.
It also made me reflect on how these interactions could matter outside of scholarly practice. How might sensing and relating with trees translate into daily practice? Something that people could take up in their day-to-day lives, as a practice in their emotional regimes or spiritual methodologies. Yet these experiences mattered to talk about through qualitative anthropological practice because they speak to knowing, relating, and meaning-making outside of what we traditionally analyze and understand as research. My research question became a grounding point and method for me to begin to slow down and explore what relating to trees looks like.
Leading with my methodology approach, I conduct sit spot observations, sensory reflection fieldnotes, semi-structured interviews, and participation observations. But before we get into how I used these, I think we should break down these terms individually and discuss what they mean and how I was able to utilize them in my project. Firstly, what is a sit spot method, and how did I employ this method while conducting research? A sit‑spot method is an embodied, sensory practice in which you regularly return to the same spot outside and sit in stillness. You let yourself be present with what is there. Use all your senses to experience your sit‑spot: seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and the subtle inner feelings you notice as you take your place there. By repeatedly going to one spot, you start to see similarities, patterns, and presences. When you are always on the go, it can be difficult to pick up on the subtleties that are there once you slow down. This practice allows you to relationally be with the beings around you rather than viewing nature as a thing.
In other words, the way that I implemented the sit‑spot method complements sensory reflection and fieldnotes by creating an embodied hierarchy to learning about a place. Sensory reflection is actively noticing these perceptions during your experience: recognizing when your emotions shift, you start to notice bodily sensations, patterns within the landscape shift, or you sense you are being with the tree/place. Taking fieldnotes translates your embodied and sensory experience into academic research. Fieldnotes document what you saw, what you sensed, and how your relationship with place deepened over time. Used together, the sit‑spot method, sensory reflection, and fieldnotes become a threefold process: sit‑spot allows you to engage with a place bodily, sensory reflection allows you to hone in on your experience there, and fieldnotes allow you to save it as data. This method also correlates with sensory ethnography and other relational methods by centering perception, embodiment, and attentiveness as valid ways of knowing and being with the more‑than‑human world.
Throughout this entire process, I conducted five semi‑structured interviews. When I initially reached out to participants, I was nervous. I didn’t know how the conversation would flow or if participants would be open to digging as deeply as I was asking. I prepared for generic answers that seemed polite but lacked any real connection to my research question. To my delight, instead, I was met with meaningful anecdotes about people's lives. Many of my participants opened up to me about vulnerable moments in their lives. Whether these stories were happy, traumatic, or somewhere in between, they each unveiled the important role that these trees had in their lives.
Interviews allowed me to learn that not only do people perceive trees spiritually, sensually, and relationally, but that many hadn’t taken the time to listen closely enough until I asked. Each interview was less about collecting data and more about connecting with someone on the experiences that made them who they are today, comfort them, or experiences that they took with them.
Finally, my participant observations were another pillar of this project. Throughout the year, I conducted various sorts of observation work. I did my initial round of participant observations in the fall, but, as mentioned above, I lacked an embodied understanding of (and complete methodological clarity on) the processes I was trying to examine. While helpful, those observations didn’t take me as deeply into the texture of the questions I was exploring as my later observations would. My observational work became more focused as my research questions began to develop. Some of my later observations foreshadowed what would ultimately become my sit‑spot practice: slow, sensory-oriented, relational experiences in dialogue with a place or tree. Before discussing the sit‑spot practice in particular, though, I want to first discuss the participant observations that comprised my methodology more generally. These observations helped me learn how people move through, relate to, and make meaning from the natural world around them. These observations also showed me, before I had concretely established the sit‑spot method, how people quietly experience trees, whether it be through touch, attention, memory, or just by being near them.
To wrap up, it's worth reiterating why these methods were brought together. I chose methods that were needed to answer my research question concerning what ways do people relate to trees spiritually, sensually, and relationally. Since my project focused on embodied, emotional, and non-verbal aspects of relating to trees that are hard to put into words, I had to seek approaches that allowed for that as well. Sit‑spotting helped me pay attention to sensuality and relationality on my own accord in order to develop familiarity with the types of experiences I was inquiring about. Sensory reflection and taking field notes allowed me to translate embodied sensations into data. Semi‑structured interviewing granted participants the space to tell their stories about trees—stories that were intimate, sacred, or otherwise personal. Participant observation granted me an opportunity to see how people navigated natural environments and what their bodies and posture could teach me about human–nature relationships that are difficult to articulate through verbal means. This meant layering methods, much like paying attention unravels layers of relationship with the more-than-human world.
Lastly, my methods were reflective of my positionality and ethics as a researcher. Interviewing people about their memories, feelings, and spirituality meant conducting myself in a manner that cared for, consented to, and took seriously what others trusted me to receive. Many participants offered up parts of their stories that they might not otherwise share. I entered every interview with gratitude and acknowledgement of what participants were giving of themselves. Spending more time with trees also meant upholding an ethic of care and reciprocity. Approaching trees as I would any other participant aligned with my relational and multispecies orientations that do not perceive nonhumans as “background” or here merely for human profit. My job was not to extract data but to listen to people, to place, and to attend to ways that trees and wilderness may “speak” back to us.
Transitioning from creating my methodology to learning about scholars who have studied and validated this type of work, I knew that Sarah Abbott had to be the first person I quoted in my literature review. Abbott’s dissertation, Tree Knowing, applies directly to my project – reading her work feels like she is articulating, expanding upon, and answering questions I have been exploring throughout my entire research process last year. She approaches trees as subjects rather than objects, grounding her perspective in the idea that trees have presence, agency, and the ability to communicate, which we can notice. This emphasis on noticing something as opposed to looking at something perfectly echoes the transition I have been trying to make with my own work, from looking at a tree to being with a tree. Her focus on sensory-based ethnography, embodied practice, and tuning into feelings and atmosphere gives language to the processes I have been implementing when sitting in my sit‑spots and conducting interviews. Sarah Abbott becomes especially significant to my project because she not only normalizes this way of knowing but grounds it in qualitative and ontological research. Through her writing, knowledge is something that happens between a human and a tree, built through conversation rather than collected from another being. As my research focuses heavily on the practices and processes of how a person interacts with trees on a spiritual, sensory, and emotional level, Abbott was the perfect author to begin this literature review with. Not only does her work run parallel to my project methodologically, but she also acts as an academic anchor that grounds me in theory. In the next section, I will discuss her research in greater detail and highlight how her work informs my own.
Abbott commands such a presence in the forest of multispecies and sensory ethnography because she forces the reader to recalibrate their gaze. She refuses to allow trees to remain inert background information or motifs for human symbolism. While many scholars offer theoretical engagements with trees, few demand that the reader relearn how to see as Abbott does. Abbott validates what I experienced while at my sit‑spots: the more you learn to exist among trees, the less you can see them as objects of your study. Learning the language, theory, practice, and commitments of multispecies ethnography allowed me to cognitively process what I had already learned performatively. Abbott’s work functioned as a lens through which I was able to see, understand, and relate to my own experiences through relation, presence, and embodied attention.
One element of Abbott’s work that became especially poignant to me was her conception of trees in a human relationship and communicative. She states, “the tree communicates through the communication, intuition, and knowledge systems of the human it is communicating with.” (Abbott, S. Tree Knowing, Pg. 45) Abbott details the necessity of listening to trees beyond the words or science that humans can gather from trees: she invites readers into slow and embodied practices of attention to allow nonverbalized meanings to arise. Abbott articulates that paying attention to energies, emotions, and physical changes in my body while sitting with trees was no less legitimate than other readings or observations, and I could intellectualize. This attribution of attunement, of listening to trees on their own terms, prompted me to reconsider the personal sensorial notes I took during my sit‑spots. In research methods training, our sensory experiences with the world are often treated as additional fluff we tack on to our work to make it feel more humane, but Abbott’s framing invited me to see that personal connection as the heart of my work.
All of Sarah Abbott’s work contributes to one major understanding that I carried with me through the rest of my literature review and into the arguments I make throughout this project. If we approach trees with our senses, our spirits, and our relationships, we can both learn from and relate to trees in a way that constitutes research-backed knowledge. Abbott asserts that not only is connecting with trees through spirituality, feeling, and relation valid, but it also helps push the boundaries of what is considered knowledge within qualitative anthropology. She provides methods and inspiration for humans to be with trees and other plants in ways that prioritize relationality, embodied ways of knowing, and attentiveness to Others. This scholarship influenced how I conducted my own research from start to finish. As I branch out to learn more from other scholars regarding multispecies relationships and sensory ethnography, I will continue to reflect on Abbott’s work and the knowledge it provided about learning through relationships.
Kirksey and Helmreich’s (2010) concept of multispecies ethnography is foundational for this study’s theoretical underpinnings. Multispecies ethnography, simply put, calls for expanding ethnographic inquiry to include the countless relationships that comprise and sustain life in worlds we share with more-than-human beings. Humans live with and among countless species of plants, animals, fungi, and microbes. Multispecies ethnographers insist that we pay attention to those beings and relationships because they, too, make lives — social lives, lives of feeling and sensation, ecological lives. Kirksey and Helmreich’s definition speaks directly to my research question concerning how people connect with trees on spiritual, sensory, and/or relational levels. Multispecies ethnography validates my perspective that trees are not merely backdrops for human activity. This perspective allows me to treat trees as lively, present, and powerful actors that may affect human memory, emotion, and experience. It allows me to interpret human‑tree interactions as relationship events rather than symbolic projections or solely subjective experiences.
Multispecies ethnography also validated my methodological choices. They call for modes of inquiry that account for more-than-human forms of communication and sociality. The sit‑spot method, sensory reflection, and fieldnotes from this project were my response to that call. They helped me pay close attention to what happens when I slow down and simply live in relation to a tree. My sensory observations and reflections documented the nuances of experience as Kirksey and Helmreich remind me that embodied, relational, sensory experiences are valid ways of knowing. Likewise, Sarah Abbott’s argument that trees speak to humans through sensory and intuitive experience feels very much connected to multispecies ethnography. By centering multispecies ethnography, I can think of my discoveries not simply as personal revelations, but as part of an intellectual project centered around discovering how humans and nonhumans come to know and remember each other.
Kohn provides another theoretical pillar on which this project rests. He calls for anthropology to shift away from anthropocentrism and consider that nonhuman persons also create meanings. He suggests forests (and the other living beings found within them) think. Meaning, forests and trees interpret, respond, and relate to other signs (not limited to human language). Kohn takes a semiotic approach and argues that plants and nonhuman animals speak to us through color, texture, patterns, growth, movement, and other modes of communication that humans experience sensorially and relationally.
Kohn expresses the view that forests and living organisms within forests practice languages of communication and translation beyond verbal expression or the spoken word.
Kohn writes, "Such encounters with other kinds of beings force us to recognize the fact that seeing, rep-
resenting, and perhaps knowing, even thinking, are not exclusively human affairs.” (Kohn,2013, How Forests Think) implies that trees are also involved in human feeling, thought, and experience as subjects rather than just objects in the background. This stance validates my interests and questions around humans encountering trees, sensory, spiritually, and relationally. If trees think, then trees are not simply objects for human projections; they are living beings that can influence how we feel, respond, perceive, and intuit. As such, Kohn’s work offers me an opportunity to consider human –tree relations without invalidating the responses humans have when they sense they are being seen, heard, comforted, grounded, or known by a tree.
Similarly, Kohn’s work is aligned with my methodological approaches. His privileging of nonlinguistic encounters allowed me to utilize sensory ethnography, sit‑spotting, and embodied fieldnotes to attend to many of the signs that were prominent to participants (sight, sounds, textures, movement, atmosphere, emotions our bodies felt while with trees). By slowing down and utilizing all my senses, I was able to record communication methods that did not always occur through language but were meaningful, nonetheless. Taking seriously how forests think allows me to think anthropologically about the more‑than‑human persons that influence humans daily. Including Kohn in this project further validates how humans can meaningfully relate to trees.
Before diving deeper, I want to offer a brief methodological basis for this study. Sarah Pink explores what it means to practice ethnography through the lens of sensory experience. In Doing Sensory Ethnography (2012), Pink centers the importance of multisensoriality in how we come to know the world around us, as well as the role that embodiment and emplacement play in shaping these processes.
As such, Pink asserts that ethnographers should consider “In Doing Sensory Ethnography I outline a way of thinking about and doing ethnography that takes as its starting point the multisensoriality of experience, perception, knowing and practice.” (Pink, Doing Sensory Ethnography, Pg. XI)
Pink’ s methodology, therefore, backs up my use of sit‑spotting, sensory reflection, and detailed fieldnotes. All three of these methods necessitated slowing down, taking notice of what my surroundings had to offer, and writing about what it felt like (literally) to be with the tree. Furthermore, Pink’s sensory ethnography centers on perception, place, memory, imagination, and how these elements shape our experiences of place. This mirrors the interactions I encountered with trees.
Treating this project through the lens of sensory ethnography also allows me to treat sensory experiences as valid. Instead of sensory experiences simply being how someone describes their relationship to a tree (or lack thereof), they can be examined as knowledge on their own accord—how people understand trees emotionally, spiritually, and physically.
Pink (2012) equally places sensory ethnography in conversation with other scholarly understandings of what it means to experience place, how we come to understand embodiment, and how the senses work together (versus separately). Recall that the senses do not work independently of one another. There is no smelling without also seeing, remembering, imagining, and so on. As such, some of the stories that participants shared with me were memories attached to certain smells, textures, sounds, or feelings in the air. Because of Pink’s (2012) work, I am now able to better contextualize why senses and affect matter when examining human–tree relationships.
Another piece I found conceptually helpful was Winthereik and Ballestero’s (2017) exploration of displacement. Winthereik and Ballestero see displacement as a theoretical resource for thinking about ethnographic situations when taken- for-granted categories, assumptions, and ways of interpreting fall away, and this idea of displacement really fits with what my participants were talking about – those times that they could sense that something had occurred between themselves and a tree, but couldn’t necessarily describe it or put words to it using conventional language.
Many tree relational practices that participants described happened at the limits of expression and understanding; they pushed against how humans conventionally know or understand nonhumans. Through Winthereik and Ballestero, I found conceptual support to understand these moments as ones of displacement – productive gaps where trees were doing something to, with, or around humans that we struggle to interpret using our ways of knowing.
Winthereik and Ballestero also help me defend my methodological choices. For sit‑spot, sensory reflection, and embodied fieldnotes, I had to slow down, unlearn typical patterns, and be open to types of communication and interaction that are nonhuman and unfamiliar. Winthereik and Ballestero write that as ethnographers, we have to be willing to stay in these moments of disorientation; to allow ourselves to be moved, disrupted, or confused by our encounters with the more-than-human. During fieldwork, there were moments where something felt important or striking (a sensory impression, atmosphere, intuition), but I couldn’t quite grasp it to turn into data. Displacement allowed me to lean into the uncertainty of being affected by trees. It’s about noticing small differences and knowing that relationships often happen where we aren’t sure what we know.
With Kohn's ideas on forest cognition, Kirksey and Helmreich's push for interspecies consideration, Pink's focus on sensory ethnography, Abbott's take on tree-human dialogue, and Winthereik and Ballestero's displacement theory now enveloped, I felt ready to craft interview questions and confidently document participant encounters. I knew what experiences I wanted to prompt from participants and what types of knowledge I should be open to learning. Interviews ranged from twenty minutes to forty minutes and were held either on campus or at a tree significant to the participant’s life. I always chose a location that the participant was already somehow settled at, rooted to, or feeling emotively connected to because I wanted the interviews to invite the sensate, relational, and affective nature of the experience to emerge. The three things that surfaced most throughout analysis of the interviews, as well as my own sit‑spot notes and sensory method, were attunement, memories, and relationships with location.
The three main questions I asked my participants during my interviews were: “How do you attune with trees? What are some happy memories you have with trees? In what ways has your relationship with trees changed over time/location?” Before sharing their answers, I want to first discuss why I chose these questions and what each individual concept (attunement, memory, change in relation) can teach us about humans’ experiences with trees. I focused on these three because together they tell a full story: how an individual first notices care/connection, how said connection deepens through memory/presence, and how it grows/transforms with them as they change places and ages.
I became drawn to the concept of attunement throughout this project. When I say attunement with trees, I am referring to a visceral sense of being seen, grounded, or understood when under the presence of a tree. It implies a level of awareness beyond merely noticing a tree: someone who feels attuned by a tree may describe the tree as making them feel held, steady, or accompanied. I was intentional about using this word because it allowed my participants to answer in their own language. By asking how they attune with trees, I was able to open up the conversation for them to explain memorable sensory/emotional/spiritual experiences they may not have otherwise known how to label. Their responses would allow me to see how they open up to trees, listen to trees, and feel seen by trees.
The answer that stood out to me the most was one participant’s description of what it felt like to attune with trees. “When I feel hopeless and powerless, I like to imagine I am a redwood. My roots are extensive, and I imagine the feeling of the soil and what it’s like to have these grounding roots. Whatever tries to move me won’t succeed because my roots are so deeply rooted.” ‘Tommy, ’ This participant’s response truly resonated with me. When they described attuning with trees, they weren’t just thinking about a tree—they imagined what it would feel like to be a tree, strong and able to stand tall during a storm, for example. To me, this describes the process of attunement beautifully. The participant engaged in a type of meditation where they used the tree as an example of strength and groundedness. They projected their inner self onto the tree and allowed the tree to show them what it felt like to be sturdy.
Trees allowed my participants to tune into a deeper sense of self. That is why I find attunement to be one of my main takeaways from this project. It showed me that trees are used by humans as more than just symbols; they are used as a means of emotional support, spiritual connection, and physical grounding.
The second question i conducted was about memory. Do you have a happy memory of a tree? This could be a happy, sad, or neutral memory.
The responses to this question varied widely, though most of them tended to be happy memories. Trees were commonly used as a setting for lazy afternoons: meeting up with friends underneath and talking, or spending time alone in a way that made you feel whole again. They were remembered as places of safety or as friends in themselves. One participant said that when she feels upset, she goes and sits under a tree. She may talk to the tree about how she’s feeling, essentially coming to the tree with intention and leaving with a clearer head. Another participant of mine had a similar response to my questions, explaining how spending time with a tree can change your emotional state. Also, leaving gifts at the bottom of the tree to show your appreciation was a practice they would do to make them feel more connected.
But there were some heartwarming memories, too. One participant shared a story about their grandmother, who planted trees. Her favorite was an oak that she had planted when my participant was young. They had tried to harvest a cone in remembrance of her after she had passed, but by the time they realized they wanted to preserve a piece of the oak, it was already too late: the tree couldn’t be saved, and neither could the cone. This memory was bittersweet, one that involved love and loss. Trees are living reminders of our families, our grief, and our desire to preserve something of the people we’ve loved and lost.
This question was special to me, so I wanted to include my own memory. I grew up with a treehouse in my dad’s backyard. The tree is still there today—I can look at it anytime I go visit, it’s become rundown, and maybe not the best idea for me to climb it. It’s old and unsafe, but it contains countless memories of me with my friends playing games like house or Tarzan. We spent hours in that tree, playing. But more than just memories of playing games, I have memories of sunshine warming my skin, wind rustling through the trees, and the dogs running around outside. Those things are ingrained in me and helped mold me into who I was at that age and how I viewed the world around me today.
The third question I asked my participants aimed to discuss how human-tree relationships shifted depending on location. Location ties back to memory, as certain places we know become home to emotional remembrances. Trees often become placeholders of our past. As we move from place to place throughout our lives, trees often ground us or help us feel re-rooted. They allow us to feel as though we can establish familiarity, find our identity, or become reminiscent of past selves once again. Although the tree itself may change when a person moves from one location to the next, the feeling of groundedness can often feel quite similar. This is why location became such an important theme when analyzing human-tree relationships.
In one specific interview, she shared a story about how there is a cluster of pine trees on campus that reminds her of home. She said she often goes out of her way to walk through the pines because it smells like Minnesota, and it helps her feel like she is home again. She described how the smell evokes memory and feeling. Her story reminds me of how powerful location can be in relation to tree-human relationships. If a person can smell home when they’re nowhere near where they come from, imagine how powerful it could be to have a tree replicate that exact location.
This idea reminds me of what it means to be grounded. Trees help us remember that we have been here before. Trees help us remember that we have felt this way before. Trees remind us that we belong here just as much as we belonged back home. Although location can change when we move from tree to tree, different trees can mimic one another and help us feel rooted through change.
Discovering how participants related to trees helped me realize how trees help us orient ourselves. Whether a tree looks like another we’ve formed a relationship with in the past or when the texture of bark lets us know we’re home, trees help us feel situated in the world.
TODAY’S ADD-ON:
In addition to asking about attunement, memory, and relationship to location, I wanted to include a question from my literature review that hadn’t come up in conversation yet. How do trees teach us? Has a tree ever taught you anything? I found that this question opened up an entirely new depth to my interviews. Rather than only discussing sensory perception of trees, participants began to delve into themes of learning, being taught/guidance, and knowledge relationality with trees. One participant’s response stood out to me in particular. She mentions how trees teach us in numerous ways and that she learned when helping teach children about nature while working at an environmental education program. She described how she’d show kids the different fruit trees throughout Minnesota (particularly serviceberries) and allow them to explore in their own way. Some would smash them with their hands and try to make paint out of them, ultimately staining their fingers. Leaving lots of kids walking away with berry-stained fingers. She realized that during these activities with kids, the trees were teaching them to be curious, creative, and learn through their entire bodies. Trees were teaching the kids by allowing them to explore multi-sensorily, play, and connect with the tree.
The framework of trees as teachers came from Sarah Abbott’s article. She pulls from Indigenous scholars for this idea, including: Harvey (2006), McGregor and Plain (2014), and Pierotti (2011). Abbott writes,
“ In many Indigenous worldviews, trees are considered persons and teachers…” (p.26). However, trees do not teach us through oral language or lessons. Rather, they teach us through our intuition, sensory awareness, and other knowledge systems we possess as humans. When I paired my participant’s account with Abbott’s article, I realized that my participant was unknowingly describing the teaching relationship between children and fruit trees. The trees taught the children to be curious, create, eat, and use their senses to explore - all of this happened through relationship rather than curriculum. Asking participants this question allowed me to understand how people learn from trees every day without even knowing it. This learning becomes threaded into personal memories, environmental value sets, and daily life.
Now that I’ve explored practices for listening with others, it seems only fitting that I talk about my own experience with my sit-spot participation. At this point in the research process, this practice became essential. Not only did Professor Hope help facilitate this method by introducing me to this sit‑spot practice. With this encouragement, I performed three iterations of sit‑spotting: once at the tree in my dad’s backyard, once at Knox College’s grounds, and once at Lake Storey, a park I went to often throughout my childhood. Each sit‑spot provided me with a different kind of relational experience, but together they taught me about how to listen to place with my senses.
I returned to the tree outside my dad’s house—one tree in particular that has stood with me throughout my childhood. I walked toward it mindfully, slowly, as I had in previous sit‑spot experiences. Sitting at the tree’s base, I felt the weight in my legs again; a sensation that reminds me gravity is not just something that happens to me but something I am in relationship with. My breathing deepened, cool in my inhalation and warm in my exhale as my body adjusted to sitting with the tree. As I opened my eyes, the tree was no longer the background. Small things moved around me: branches gently swaying in the wind, a leaf falling beside me—slowly enough that I could watch it flip in the air. When I ran my hand along the bark of the tree, I noticed the roughness against my fingertips and how time has made it look more rugged. I felt grounded by this and comfort. When I listened, the faraway sounds dissolved into quiet, and the nearby chorus of leaves buzzing filled my ears. After crushing a fallen leaf in my hand, I breathed in the green aroma that reminded me of summers past, sitting and playing in this yard. Smell is powerful; it transports me and superglues emotion to place. Studying a small twig, I noticed grooves and patterns that I would never have thought to take the time to look at before. Solid. Present. Still, I walked around the tree, feeling every footstep press my weight into the earth below. As I moved, I reminded myself that slowing down is a practice too; an ethics mirrored in my own multispecies attentiveness for this project. By the time I sat back down, my body had quieted. I felt softer. When I stood up to leave, I felt a sense of interconnectedness that exists when we bring our full sentient bodies to Sit.
The second sit‑spot that I chose was located on campus. I spent time near the big ginkgo tree on Knox’s campus. I picked this tree because it has been planted here for about a hundred years, witnessing Knox throughout its history, and was planted by a professor. Also near this tree is a bench I frequently visit between classes or after. When I sit on this bench, I try to take in the surroundings rather than rushing to class. I sat down and allowed myself to listen to the birds chirping above me from the branches of the tree, the footsteps of students walking on the sidewalk, and the faint sounds of the cars driving down the street. This tree is located where students frequently walk, as I visited this sit‑spot around noon when students were traveling to and from classes or the library. I got to people-watch and observe the things that were centered around me. This sit‑spot was special to me because I was able to observe the daily life at Knox while also realizing how the tree roots that space.
My final sit‑spot was located at Lake Storey. I visited this lake frequently with my father growing up, walking the dogs, so it is very nostalgic to me. I have connected with a few trees while I’m out there, but my favorite tree out there is just a really big tree located between the lake and the playset. I cannot recall what type of tree it is, but I’ve always loved it because there was one branch that hung low enough for me to sit on.
I sat there during this sit‑spot on that branch, just as it did when I was younger. Something I noticed during my sit‑spot was my surroundings: I was close enough to the lake that I could hear ducks/geese across from one side to the other, and see couples walking on the path next to me. It grounded me in this state of meditation. While sitting there, I also found myself reminiscing on times I spent at this lake with my dogs; we would walk through the trails or walk on the sidewalk. Everything around me had transformed my mindset to thinking about how memories can become anchored to places, and visiting these places can help you remember.
A second type of participant observation I conducted (aside from sitting in my sit‑spots) was visiting the Knox College Farm to engage with my community in a tree‑planting event. Members of the Knox community were invited to volunteer their time to help plant new trees on campus. Students and staff worked in groups throughout this time and dug holes, where we placed the tree saplings. Using your hands to interact with the earth and plants creates a different connection than simply observing. Feeling the shovel in my hands, smelling the dirt, getting dirty myself as I knelt down to pull bricks out of the holes reminded me that I was a part of something. My group was tasked with planting serviceberry trees. Planting them and learning about the tree during the process made me feel like I was further connecting with the trees I had been studying during my sit‑spots. Seeing everyone work together to help each other dig holes, move trees, make adjustments, and ensure each tree was planted gave me feelings of togetherness. I never thought something as simple as planting trees would make me feel like my research topic’s relational themes were at work. Students and trees are working together to help cultivate this space. When I left that day, I felt connected to the people who were around me in some way. And these trees will be here, long after I graduate, so when I come back someday, I can look at the progress that has been made.
But why does this project matter? If nothing else, it affirms the importance of human/tree relationships: they are real, embodied experiences—not abstract concepts or poetic language—that ground people in who they are and the world they inhabit. Whether in my interviews or sit‑spot notes, or others’ experiences, trees were consistently described as grounding, comforting, familiar, and instructive. Trees seem to teach through the body—the breath, the touch, the sounds one hears while leaning against a tree’s strong trunk, the memories embedded in certain trees or places, the feeling of sitting with a tree. Many scholars have made this argument; it’s not news to them at least: Trees are persons, teachers. Sarah Abbott and the Indigenous scholars she references understand trees as intuitively shaping emotions and awareness. When my participants said that trees taught them resilience or how to be calm, centered, creative, or slow, they were recognizing this, too. Sitting under my dad’s tree and the century‑old ginkgo tree on campus and the tree at Lake Storey only further confirmed that for me: how memory, place, and attention to sensation work together to ground you, root you in relationship to your environment. Trees can contain our memories of past experiences near them, they can ground us emotionally when other parts of our lives are changing, and they return our attention to a single place. Recognizing these relationships affirms that these types of connections between people and trees are worthwhile. It opens the mind to the possibility that our relationships with trees can be reciprocal—trees aren’t just scenery, but beings with which we can interact and learn from.
And so, finally, at the end of this work, what I know is this: this project isn’t just interviews or observations or theory. It is proof of relationships. Quiet but powerful relationships that my participants have with trees, relationships that my participants have with the place, and human lives intimately tied to the more‑than‑human world, not in ways that are lofty or metaphorical but in simple, real, sensorial, felt ways. I learned this over and over from my participants’ stories. I learned it through my own sit‑spot practice. I learned it through all the readings I used to build my theoretical framework. Trees matter because they stand with us. Trees remember. Trees keep us grounded, literally. They teach us. They ground us in place. We don’t know we need them until we’re asked to articulate the role they play in our lives.
Ultimately, though, what I hope this project shows is that attending to our relationships with trees is more than an intellectual practice. It is a practice of dwelling differently. By doing this, I mean that when we pay attention to trees—as living entities with memory and grounding presence that can sculpt our emotions and inhabit us as teachers—care structures the reciprocity between our own flourishing and the flourishing of the places we dwell in. This matters because ecological engagement does not happen only on large scales or in theoretical debates—it happens in the quiet moments when we pause and recognize our relationship with these trees. It happens when we sit beneath the branches of our childhood oak. When we hear stories from our campus ginkgo. When we plant saplings with our community. Tree relationships teach us how to take care of our environment by learning to notice the intimate and reciprocal bonds we already share with trees.