HORVATLAND - THE '70s - PROJECTS - PORTRAITS OF TREESGO TO HOME

(From my foreword to The Tree)

Before my photography of trees made me aware of it, I had never thought of this fundamental difference between the plants and ourselves: we – the animals – have evolved towards motion, to the point of developing these virtual movements that are our perceptions and our imagination. Plants have devised a passivity that turns out to be just as efficient. The male gametes of the more primitive species still have flagella, by which they propel themselves (very much like sperm) towards the gametes of the opposite sex, while the so-called higher plants obtain the same result by simply entrusting their pollen to the wind or to flying insects. When I think of the biological achievement of these organisms, which are tied to the ground and can only overcome distance by borrowing a mobility that is not their own, it seems to me that they teach us a lesson that we could well use. I sometimes try to imagine the geological eras in which a particular group of beings, in order to better serve their needs, have ‘decided’ to move (which required sensory perceptions, motor organs and some kind of nervous system to co-ordinate the ones with the others) while a second group has ‘chosen’ to stay in place. An observer from a distant galaxy, who didn’t know what was to follow, might have foreseen that the plants would eventually be devoured – but we know that this is far from having been the case: deprived of perceptions and of movement – and even, to a certain extent, of individuality (since a new individual can develop from any young plant cell) – the vegetal world prospers, replicates itself, ‘expresses' itself by adapting to its environment, spreads and diversifies in uncountable numbers. But above all, and simply in terms of biomass, it dominates the planet. Animals are but its auxiliaries (or else its parasites) and remain always, directly or indirectly, dependent on plants for their assimilation of carbon – i.e. for their energy. This is the other lesson that the trees teach me, on my summer evenings in Cotignac, when I watch them conquering the space around them by the forking out of their branches and their roots: I am surrounded by beings, whose way of existence is diametrically different to mine – and which are not doing so badly for all that…