There was once a vast and prosperous orchard, founded on a simple but difficult promise: that every tree, no matter its seed, would have the right to the sun and the soil. It was a messy, chaotic, and beautiful place.
The first seeds were planted in soil still stained with the memory of a conquest, and the first saplings grew strong by borrowing the labor of trees that were not yet free. This was the orchard’s original, unspoken debt.
For generations, the orchard grew. Some trees stayed in the quiet, familiar groves where their seeds first fell. Their roots ran deep, intertwined with their neighbors. Their lives were slow, steady, and governed by the predictable rhythm of the seasons. They valued the strength of the old wood and were suspicious of new grafts.
Others, driven by a restless hunger for more sun, more sky, grew tall and fast in the crowded center of the orchard. Their branches were a chaotic tangle, each one fighting for its own space. Life was faster here, more competitive. New seeds arrived constantly from distant lands, bringing strange pollen and new ideas. To survive, they learned a different kind of symbiosis, a quiet understanding that allowed a thousand different species to grow together without choking each other out.
The orchard was not perfect, but it worked. The old groves provided the stability, and the crowded center provided the innovation.
Then, the sickness came. It began quietly. The keepers of the orchard, the ones responsible for its care, became more interested in the size of their own branches than in the health of the roots. Promises were made to the new saplings—the promise of endless sun, of a place in the canopy—only for them to find that the price was a credit they could never repay. When a blight came or the jobs dried up, they were left to wither alone, far from the deep, interconnected roots of their ancestral groves.
The trees in the quiet groves saw this suffering, but they did not understand it. “They chose to leave,” they whispered. “They chose the fast life. Their failure is their own.” A quiet, creeping lack of empathy began to poison the soil.
At the same time, a new tool appeared in the orchard. A small, glowing device that allowed every tree to see and speak to every other tree, all at once. At first, it was a miracle, a way to share stories and sunlight. But soon, the trees stopped looking at the real sun and the real branches around them. They spent their days looking at the glowing images of other trees, curated to make them feel angry at the groves they were not in.
Into this sickness stepped a new Head Gardener. He was not like the old ones. He did not speak of the hard work of tending to the soil. He spoke only of the glory of the tallest trees. He told the quiet groves that the crowded, chaotic center was a disease, a blight on the purity of the orchard. He told the struggling trees in the center that the old groves were hoarding the sun.
He held a meeting in the great clearing. He stood before the oldest, strongest branches of the orchard, the ones sworn to protect its health. And one by one, he began to name the trees he said were sick, the ones whose pollen was a threat, the ones whose roots were disloyal. And in the silence of that clearing, the other branches did nothing. They watched as their brothers were marked for the axe, and they said nothing.
This is how an orchard dies. Not from a single storm, but from a thousand small cuts. From the slow, steady erosion of the belief that the health of your neighbor’s roots is inseparable from your own. From the moment we forget that we are not just individual trees, but a single, interconnected forest.