Captive

Trees are relentless! Actually, do they really have an option? Clearly the tree was here before the fence; when the fence was installed, it isn’t as though the tree could decide to move a bit to the left to avoid an inevitable collision. It had no choice.

But perhaps that’s not the only way to look at this. Perhaps the tree never paid any attention to the fence. Perhaps it just continued to do what it had been doing ever since it sprouted - growing upward and outward, making leaves and branches, the work of being a tree.

In this latter view, the tree just swallowed the fence as needed to keep its growth moving. Stolid, relentless, inexorable - all words I would use to describe this aspect of trees’ growth.

The truth is that as humans unable yet to communicate with plants, we have no way of knowing. And so perhaps it’s some amalgam of the two. And I suspect that this occupies more of my attention than of any tree!!