The Omniscient Eye
Do Good-Looking Trees Have Great Personalities?
In some RPG systems, trees can be rendered sentient. It would be fun to go beyond the GM roleplaying them all as exact clones of Treebeard, and one aid toward that goal would be some guidelines for what kinds of personalities various species of tree have been portrayed as having in old myths. E.g. what is an oak like? Are date palms cheerful or morose? Do birches tend toward extroversion or introversion? And so forth . . .
--Peter KnutsenLet's approach this question from a botanist's perspective instead. Trees compete for space (sunlight), nutrients, and water. Most trees prefer sunny sites with non-acidic soil that is neither dry nor waterlogged. Some trees are better than others at surviving outside this optimal zone. Trees that can seize all the sunlight, nutrients, or water at a site will drive out other species. Usually, trees that cast heavy shade have seedlings that can sprout in heavy shade and vice versa. The personalities of tree species will be impacted by their natural ability to compete, the types of sites they prefer and occupy, and their experiences with other trees and humans now and in the past.
As a real-life example, we can look at tree history and politics in part of central Europe since the last ice age (about 14,000 years ago). It is an area of warm summers (seldom above 86° F), cool winters (seldom below -4°F), and long springs and falls. . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: July 14, 2006
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