SPEAKING OF TREES: What North Carolinians have to learn from our state’s iconic trees

WALK IN THE WOODS: Andy Wood and Rachel Lewis Hilburn at Raven Rock State Park in Harnett County. Courtesy Amphibious Cinema.

Andy Wood and Rachel Lewis Hilburn are ankle deep in the filmy green waters of a bottomland heartwood swamp, standing at the base of a very large tree. Rather, Hilburn is standing in the tree. The trunk of the centuries-old cypress stretches twice the wingspan of its occupant and features a tall opening wide enough for her to easily slip through, as though through a portal into the cavernous world within. A cardinal tentatively picks at a bare twig. A small frog sits on a red bracket fungus. The winter quiet of the [TK Black River] expands around them. 

“It’s a little chilly,” Hilburn says as she takes in the world she has entered, and she begins to wonder about her neighbors. “So, in the summer, what kinds of creatures would be up inside here?” she asks Wood. 

“Lots of spiders,” he says, nonchalantly, as Hillburn instantly makes a move for the exit. 

Wood laughs affably and reassures Hilburn there is nothing to fear. “It’s not summer!” Still, she quickly squelches out of the tree and back into the relative openness of the swamp. 

Hilburn, a local journalist and native of the suburbs, has followed Wood, an aptly named conservation biologist and science educator, into the swamps of the Black River Preserve in Pender County to meet this particular bald cypress tree as part of a new, short-form series called “Speaking of Trees,” set to air on PBS’s Sci NC program on October 9. While her reaction to the mention of spiders is one many viewers will recognize, it’s one show creators hope to change. 

The 6-part series follows the dialectic duo of Hilburn and Wood on a series of “cinematic hikes” through public parks in and around Carolina’s coastal plains, with each 6-minute segment culminating in the pair’s arrival at a scientifically significant tree—the largest and oldest long leaf pines, a Hemlock tree that harkens to North Carolina’s pre-ice age history, the aforementioned vestibular cypress—exploring the ecological communities of those trees along the way. 

HUGE HUGS: Andy and Rachel hugging the largest known longleaf pine tree in NC at Weymouth Woods Sandhills Nature Preserve. Courtesy Amphibious Cinema.

The instinct at play in Hilburn’s reaction to the threat of spiders in the cypress swamp is familiar to Wood as a biologist. 

“It’s called an ‘ecosystem of fear,’” he says, referring to an ecological term describing the ways predator-prey relationships can influence wildlife movements. ”A deer, when they come to know that there is a wolf in that stand of trees, the deer will avoid that stand of trees,” Wood explains, “and if somebody is afraid of bees, they might avoid a wildflower garden. Or if they’re afraid of snakes, they might avoid going outside at all.” 

Wood owes this often misplaced fear to a lack of familiarity with the natural world and its functions. “It’d be like us looking up at the Statue of Liberty! Snakes don’t have any interest in us, they are way more afraid of us than we could ever be of them.” In this way, he sees his and Hilburn’s expert-novice dynamic as a key feature of their storytelling.

Wood is completely at home in the forests and swamps. His father was an entomologist and herpetologist who studied ticks and poison frogs in pursuit of then-groundbreaking cancer therapies for the American Cancer Society in the 1950s and ‘60s. Wood himself participated in environmental activism in his teens by tagging along with a few of Nader’s Raiders, the crew of student activists led by Ralph Nader in the 1970s. “I have been in the game of the environment literally since I was born,” he says.

Wood proudly owns his perspective as a seasoned scientist, but recognizes that some of this expertise can create distance, rather than foster connection, for the uninitiated. “Oftentimes you’ll see a science program or a scientist being interviewed, and even I come away thinking, What the hell did that guy just say?” 

That’s where Rachel Lewis Hilburn comes in. “She is just extremely curious,” says Wood. “Rachel is a gifted journalist, and she is not a scientist, so she will ask questions that you and others in our community might ask, and often don’t, but Rachel does.”  

HEMLOCK TALK: Andy Wood and Rachel Lewis Hilburn talk about the problem of the woolly adelgid on hemlocks at Hemlock Bluffs Nature Preserve. Courtesy Amphibious Cinema.

Wood and Hilburn first collaborated on a well-received podcast, “In the Wild Coastal Plains,” made in conjunction with WHQR’s Coastline, which Hilburn hosted and produced until 2024. 

“We did that podcast with the hope to provide information for people to think about while also building listeners’ confidence in being outdoors in nature,” says Wood. 

Naturalism is a family affair in the Wood Household—Andy’s son, Robin Wood of Amphibious Cinema, is the series’ cinematographer. It was he and his business partner Matt McCoy who first saw the potential of a Hilburn-Wood collaboration for the screen, following the podcast’s success. 

Robin Wood, too, seeks to make the outdoors attractive to series’ viewers through his camera work. “What we hope is that people will see how peaceful and how serene it is to be in a forested environment,” Robin says. 

Robin and Andy both cite the Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku, or Forest Bathing, as an example of nature as an antidote to anxiety, rather than cause. “[It’s] the practice of just being outside and being present with yourself, with your breath, with your movement, in the forest with the trees,” Robin says, describing how the practice has influenced his cinematic approach for the show. “We were really trying to focus our efforts on slowing down the process and trying to create a program that feels more meditative than anxious.” 

Robin is the first to admit, though, that anxiety is a common side effect of telling nature’s stories today. “Especially with environmental content, every story we tell is this big, bold, beautiful story that’s also entrenched in tragedy,” he says. “Whether it’s the tragedy of the human experience or the tragedy of mass extinctions, or sea level rise or expansion, whatever term you want to use … It’s just a big, sad story.” 

Andy Wood also acknowledges that what the trees have to tell us can sometimes be hard to hear. “Trees are living organisms that have been on this planet much longer than we have, and they’re still here, and they are, in and of themselves, each a sentinel.” 

The Cape Fear’s own cypress tree stands, choked with salt from a river that becomes increasingly saline with each seasonal dredging, often called “ghost forests” are a prime example. “They are a guard telling us something about our environment. They are telling us something is wrong with the river.” But, “this is not a doom and gloom show,” Andy assures. The trees have another message for us as well.

Robin’s favorite episode centers on an American Beech tree in Hemlock Bluffs Nature Preserve whose roots have split through the surrounding rock. Andy describes the story it tells as one of resilience. 

LIZARD LOOKS: Eastern Fence Lizard at Weymouth Woods Sandhills Nature Preserve. Courtesy Amphibious Cinema. 

“When you visit that tree, you can see its octopus-like legs insinuating into these cracks of a rock that the roots of trees have helped expand,” Andy explains. “A crack in a rock may literally be the width of a human hair. But the tip of a tree root is only one cell wide, and that’s all it needs; for the one cell-width tip of the root to insert itself into the crack of the rock and over time that root will expand forward, swelling as it grows, into the crack, wedging that rock open year after year, crumbling mountains.” 

Back in the Cypress swamp, Hilburn asks what the sentinel tree she has just encountered has to tell us. “That the ecosystem is still intact,” Andy responds. “That’s the really, really good news.” 

Even now, summer is ending and the Bald Cypress still stands, just off an easily accessible foot path in one of North Carolina’s ancient and still-vibrant natural areas. Perhaps inspired to follow in Wood and Hilburn’s footsteps, we, too, can approach its portal, and step through. 

“Speaking of Trees” will air on PBS’s Sci NC biweekly from October 9- November 13, and available on SciNC’s YouTube Channel following its broadcast.