> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://fern.happychases.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # What The Overstory taught me about patience - URL: https://fern.happychases.com/what-the-overstory-taught-me-about-patience/ - Published: 2026-09-21T08:30:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-03T21:26:33.000Z - Description: A novel about trees rearranged how I think about time, effort and the long game of gardening. Thoughts after finishing Richard Powers’s Pulitzer-winning book, and a few reservations. - Author: Ines Moreau - Tags: Reading, Essays I picked up *The Overstory* in a charity shop because the cover was green and I was feeling sentimental about hardwood forests. I assumed it would be a pleasant, slightly worthy novel to read in the bath. It turned out to be the kind of book that moves into your head and quietly rearranges the furniture. Richard Powers published it in 2018, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year. It follows a group of people whose very different lives become entangled with trees. I finished it three weeks ago, and I’m still thinking about it every time I walk past the oak at the end of my street. Here are some thoughts, including a few reservations. ![A very old oak tree standing alone in an autumn field](https://picsum.photos/seed/fern-old-oak/1600/900) A tree that was already old when my grandparents were born. ## A book built like a tree The structure is the first thing that gets you. The novel is divided into four parts: Roots, Trunk, Crown and Seeds. It begins with the separate backstories of its characters, each one sinking its own thread into the ground, before the stories converge, spread out and finally scatter. You can feel the form working on you as you read. It starts slow and underground, and for a long while it’s hard to see where it’s heading. Then it grows, and you realise the slow part was the point. It’s a rare thing for a book’s shape to teach you how to read it. Reading the early chapters, I kept wanting to hurry them along. By the end, I understood I’d been doing exactly what the book was gently arguing against. ## Time on a different scale What stayed with me most was the shift in how time is measured. Most of my gardening is organised around seasons; a year is the basic unit. The novel keeps stretching that unit. A tree that has been alive for centuries operates on a clock so slow that our fast, noisy lives barely register on it, and we, in turn, mistake our own activity for importance. I’ve started noticing this in my own plot. Three winters ago I planted a young apple tree. It has produced eleven apples in total. My first instinct was impatience; my second, after reading this book, was a kind of embarrassment at expecting a living thing to meet a schedule that I made up. > Patience isn’t waiting. It’s paying attention to something that is moving at a different speed from you. ## The characters, and the one who stayed Powers gives each of his characters a different way in: a botanist, an artist, a game designer, a veteran, a student. Some of them felt vivid and real to me, and some felt more like vehicles for the book’s ideas. The one who stayed with me is Patricia Westerford, a scientist whose research on how trees respond to danger and to each other is dismissed by her peers, long before the wider world begins to catch up with her. There’s a lesson in that, beyond botany. Careful, quiet observation, done over many years, can see things that clever people in a hurry will miss. I find this strangely comforting as a gardener with no formal training. My notebook of dates and weather has told me more about my own soil than any article. ## Where I’m sceptical I don’t want to pretend the book is flawless. In its later sections, it leans toward the sermon, and there are moments when the trees are treated as wiser than the people around them in a way I find a little sentimental. Some of the more mystical passages didn’t work for me. The activism storylines are morally complicated, and the novel is honest about that, though not always satisfyingly so. I’d also add a gentle caution about the popular science that surrounds books like this. The idea of forests as tightly connected communities, sharing resources through underground fungal networks, is both fascinating and still actively debated by researchers. It’s worth reading the nuance as well as the headline. A novel gets to be beautiful first and precise second, and that’s a perfectly fair trade for fiction. ## What it changed in how I garden A novel shouldn’t change your behaviour, but this one nudged mine in a few small and lasting ways: - **I plant for people I’ll never meet.** There’s now a hazel hedge along the back fence and an acorn growing in a pot on the windowsill. I won’t see either of them mature. - **I stopped treating dead wood as waste.** A log pile now sits in the shadiest corner, and it’s already busy with beetles and fungi. - **I leave the leaves.** Under shrubs and along the borders, fallen leaves stay where they land, feeding the soil and sheltering whatever lives there. - **I slow down in the first minutes.** Before I start any job, I look at the plant for a bit longer than I think I need to. ## The patience problem The deeper lesson, for me, is that patience isn’t passive. We tend to picture it as sitting still while something happens elsewhere. But the patience of a good gardener is a form of active attention: tending, noticing, adjusting, and, above all, refusing to force things before they’re ready. It’s a skill that gets stronger with use, and it turns out to apply to far more than vegetables. I suspect that’s why this novel hit me so hard. We live in a time that rewards speed and punishes waiting, and here was a book of five hundred pages telling me, with enormous generosity, to slow down. I don’t think I’ve fully managed it. But I’ve started to catch myself rushing, which is the first step. ## Should you read it? If you’re looking for a fast, plot-driven page-turner, probably not. If you’re happy to be led slowly, to read something that asks for your attention and pays it back much later, then yes, absolutely. Read it in autumn if you can. And when you’re done, go and sit under the nearest big tree for ten minutes, without your phone. You’ll see what I mean.