When Trees Testify: Reckoning with Black History Through the Science and Wisdom of Plants

This stunning cultural and personal reclamation of Black history and Black botanical mastery offers up lessons from the natural world shared through the stories of long-lived trees.

The histories of trees in America are also the histories of Black Americans. Pecan trees were domesticated by an enslaved African named Antoine; sycamore trees were both havens and signposts for people trying to escape enslavement; poplar trees are historically associated with lynching; and willow bark has offered the gift of medicine. These trees, and others, testify not only to the complexity of the Black American narrative but also to a heritage of Black botanical expertise that, like Native American traditions, predates the United States entirely.

In When Trees Testify, award-winning plant biologist Beronda L. Montgomery explores the ways seven trees--as well as the cotton shrub--are intertwined with Black history and culture. She reveals how knowledge surrounding these trees has shaped America since the very beginning. As Montgomery shows, trees are material witnesses to the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants.

Combining the wisdom of science and history with stories from her own path to botany, Montgomery talks to majestic trees, and in this unique and compelling narrative, they answer.

Beronda L. Montgomery is an award-winning plant biologist, dean at Grinnell College, and author of the acclaimed Lessons from Plants (Harvard University Press, 2021). She has been named one of the journal Cell’s 100 Inspiring Black Scientists in America, and was awarded the 2021 Cynthia Westcott Science Writing Award and 2022 Adolph E. Gude, Jr. Award for outstanding service to the science of plant biology. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Society of Plant Biologists, the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and the American Academy of Microbiology.