[Rose Pacheco] I am Rose Pacheco, and I'm a Garden Educator at Cylburn Arboretum, and I take care of a lot of the trees in the collection. To me this feels very familiar, because I am in this environment frequently. I know that the pockets of these places are smaller and smaller as time goes on. I could imagine that this forest smells like fungus and decaying leaves and just a general dampness, I guess. Looking at the roots, you can see that a major one has rotted and broke already. The two trees are definitely connected underground and they communicate with each other constantly. They share resources. They are probably siblings, or one is an offspring from the other one, just because they're so close together, that just indicates that seeds fell in the same spots. You can actually see that they're probably connected through their roots here. But they're connected to everything around them, not just each other. So they're connected to this other tree on the far left, they're connected to the little, tiny plants up in front of them. Indigenous people have known for a really long time that trees communicate this way. This is a very old belief that the trees are connected and talking to each other. Even without the modern science that we have now, where it proves that the whole forest is connected.

This black-and-white etching, measuring approximately 11 and a half inches high and 16 and a half inches wide, depicts a massive beech tree near a clearing at the edge of a forest. The image is printed in an oval shape on a rectangular sheet of paper. This work is considered a portrait of the tree, owing to the artist’s close attention to the roots, branches, ground, and surrounding landscape. The large tree is located slightly to the right in the scene. Its extensive and partially exposed root system clings to the side of a hill, and the tree’s thick trunk leans starkly toward the left of the print. The trunk of a second, smaller tree, to the left of the primary tree, curves toward the right in the direction of the larger tree. Their foliage meets at the canopy near the center, top of the print. A valley clearing can be seen between the two trees in the far distance.