Jazimina Creamer-MacNeil on “Root Song”
This piece was also featured in the April 2026 print edition of the Southwest Globe Times newspaper.
From May 29-31, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society presents Root Song, a special project at Bartram’s Garden that invites audiences to discover the ancient wisdom of the trees. The project includes two performances by Roomful of Teeth—an eight-voice “singing forest”—with Indigenous storytelling, transforming the unseen realities of the woodland into a musical conversation. Additional workshops and a panel discussion with Robin Wall Kimmerer and Suzanne Simard explore the interconnectedness of the natural world and our role within this web of relationships. For tickets and information, visit pcmsconcerts.org/rootsong.
Jazimina Creamer-MacNeil, the project’s creative director, has always been inspired by the hidden life of trees. Here she shares her motivation for mounting this project and her hopes for creating a space to remember our roots.
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There is an old Welsh proverb that says Dod yn ôl at fy nghoed, which literally translates as “To come back to my trees.” When used in conversation, it is taken to mean that one has returned to a balanced state of mind or rediscovered one’s center. Nobody knows for sure where or when this proverb originated, but in Welsh culture it carries the sense of an ancient wisdom, one that is often connected to the Druids of the deep past. It evokes a feeling that the self is intimately connected to trees, and that they in turn have the ability to guide and teach us the wonders and mysteries of life. When we return to the trees, something remarkable happens: we discover who we are, who we were meant to be, and how we can express that to the world at large. ~ Kristoffer Hughes
Ever since I was a child, I have talked with trees. Not to, but with. Talked in a heart-language of felt sense, which as a child I never doubted was flowing both ways. But as I grew from a sapling into something sturdier, the world didn’t have room for my tree friendships, my tree love, so I tucked it away in a safe, deep corner, like a box of childhood treasures kept high up on a closet shelf. The world continually told me, in myriad unspoken ways that only humans and household pets were worthy recipients of my friendship and love; that to be friends with any other kind of being was weird. Not in touch with reality. Childish. A little crazy. While I am unabashedly all of these things, still I hid my tree love, my experience of being loved by them in return– hid this from the world and even from my own adult rational mind.
Then I started working on Root Song. Or more accurately, Root Song started working on me. I learned how alive and awake my tree friends are to the world, and even to my presence: through touch, through sound, through sight, through smell– all of which scientists are just beginning to acknowledge, let alone understand. I learned about tree language, the volatile organic compounds trees emit from their leaves to communicate with each other (and beyond their species) with exquisite specificity – and that breathing in the pinene emitted by the White Pines along the forest path behind my home up-regulates my immune system to fight cancer cells. For a month. Why?? I learned from Suzanne Simard how Mother Trees nurture their seedlings through underground mycorrhizal networks, sharing both resources and tree-wisdom. How?? I learned about Darwin’s study of what he called “root-brain” and so many more delicious discoveries, leading to even more delicious questions.
Suddenly I realized: that box I had tucked safely in the upper shelf of the closet in my mind was now open in my hands, the childhood treasure trove of tree love shining like an invitation to the best party imaginable. This beautiful science was giving my adult brain permission to believe what my childhood self had known all along: there’s someONE on the other side of this relationship, as awake to the world as I am. Definitely NOT an inert someTHING.
A thousand years ago, Aristotle constructed a hierarchy he called the Scala Naturae, or Ladder of Nature, which placed humans at the top of a pyramid of intelligence and importance, with plants at the very bottom, just above the stones and soil. And ouch, it’s lonely at the top! To say nothing of how this worldview justifies the kind of global destruction of living systems we witness every day. But gloriously, blessedly, and just in the nick of time, the burgeoning and controversial field of plant cognition is shaking up that pyramid, unrefutably bending it back into a circle of kinship, into the entanglement of relationships which our ancient ancestors and our childhood selves knew to be the true nature of this good green Earth. To come back to our trees is to come back into relationship with the more-than-human world, to see ourselves anew in the context of these relationships, and to lose the loneliness at the top of the hierarchy as we begin to tune back into the boisterous family chatter of living beings. In coming back to my trees, I am re-learning how to be a human in this time of peril and possibility. I see them beckoning to each of us, branches wide in welcome: come home, come home.
