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The Hoel family chestnut tree symbolizes the passage of time; humanity’s destructive power against nature; and the potential for storytelling and art to make a positive change in the world.
When Jørgen Hoel moves from Brooklyn to Iowa to start a family in the mid-1800s, he brings six chestnut seeds with him and plants them in his new home. Years later, only one has survived, but it continues to grow and thrive until the tree is a landmark known for miles around. In the meantime, a blight brought from imported trees wipes out billions of chestnuts in their natural range along the American East Coast. After Jørgen’s death, his adult son John buys an early camera and starts photographing the tree from the same position once every month. John continues this ritual for his entire life, and so does his son after him. In the book’s present day, Nick Hoel is fascinated by the book of photographs, which show the chestnut tree’s growth over the course of decades through just a flip of its pages.
Most importantly, the tree—and the photographs of it—show how time passes differently for trees and for humans. Though a tree seems stationary and lifeless from a human point of view, the photo book allows people to see time from a tree’s perspective, visually portraying its growth and movement at a rate that we can actually understand. This is an early symbol of The Overstory’s larger point that trees have intelligence and purpose of their own; they just move through time in a different way than humans do. Looking through the photos doesn’t really give someone like Nick the full experience of living like a tree does, but it can help put this experience in human terms.
At the same time, the chestnut blight—which eventually reaches even the Hoel chestnut and kills it, though it is hundreds of miles outside of its native range—shows how human interference can be extremely destructive to the balance of nature. While the blight is not an example of purposeful destruction, it is entirely a product of human activity, in this case shipping in chestnut trees from Southeast Asia for commercial purposes. The tree’s fate shows how shortsighted greed can have devastating and long-lasting effects beyond humanity’s immediate desire for growth and profit.
Finally, the book of photographs of the Hoel chestnut represents the power of art to change people for the better. Nick is inspired by the photographs at a young age, and he incorporates the image of the chestnut into his artistic work later in life, both before and after his involvement with the other characters and their environmental activism. Having this visual representation of time as a tree sees it, the book suggests, can help people step outside of their own perspectives and consider other kinds of life as being just as valuable as their own.
The Hoel Chestnut Tree Quotes in The Overstory
The The Overstory quotes below all refer to the symbol of The Hoel Chestnut Tree. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Part 1: Roots—Nicholas Hoel
Quotes
The generations of grudge, courage, forbearance, and surprise generosity: everything a human being might call the story happens outside his photos’ frame. Inside the frame, through hundreds of revolving seasons, there is only that solo tree, its fissured bark spiraling upward into early middle age, growing at the speed of wood.
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Part 2: Trunk
Quotes
On his fourth night in the cell, Nick dreams about the Hoel family chestnut. He watches it, sped up thirty-two million times, reveal again its invisible plan. He remembers, in his sleep, on the cot's thin mattress, the way the time-lapse tree waved its swelling arms. The way those arms tested, explored, aligned in the light, writing messages in the air. In that dream, the trees laugh at them. Save us? What a human thing to do. Even the laugh takes years.
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“How long can it last?”
“Not long,” he promises.
She claws at him, an animal falling from a great height. Then she calms again. “But not this? This will never end—what we have. Right?”
He waits too long, and time replies for him. She struggles for a few seconds to hear the answer, before softening into whatever happens next.
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Part 4: Seeds
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Although he should just shut up, so much time has passed since Nick has had the luxury of saying anything to anyone that he can't resist. His hand goes out, gesturing toward the conifers. "It amazes me how much they say, when you let them. They're not that hard to hear."
The man chuckles. "We've been trying to tell you that since 1492."
The man has jerked meat. Nick doles out the last of his fruit and nuts. "I'm going to have to think about restocking soon."
For some reason, his colleague finds this funny, too. The man swivels his head around the woods as if there were forage everywhere. As if people could live here, and die, with just a little looking and listening. From nowhere, in a heartbeat, Nick understands what Maidenhair's voices must always have meant. The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help.
Not them; us. Help from all quarters.
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Get the entire The Overstory LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Hoel Chestnut Tree Symbol Timeline in The Overstory
The timeline below shows where the symbol The Hoel Chestnut Tree appears in The Overstory. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Part 1: Roots—Nicholas Hoel
All along the East Coast of the United States, it is “the time of chestnuts.” Jørgen Hoel, a recent Norwegian immigrant to Brooklyn, joins a group who are throwing stones...
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...but they keep working. Vi gets pregnant in the spring. In May, Jørgen finds six chestnuts in his pocket from the day he proposed, and he plants them. The narrator notes...
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...many more children. Years pass, and Jørgen keeps fighting to keep his farm and his chestnut seedlings alive. One fails to sprout, one is killed in the winter of 1862, and...
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...notes that Jørgen will never read his words. On the Hoel farm, the three surviving chestnut trees keep growing, and Jørgen dreams of their future bounty of chestnuts. But one tree...
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More years pass, and lightning strikes one of the chestnut trees, which burns to the ground. The last chestnut keeps growing and flowering, though now...
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...In 1901, Jørgen lies dying in his bedroom, looking out the window at the last chestnut tree as his granddaughter attends to him. He dies soon after, and John Hoel buries...
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The chestnut tree becomes a “sentinel tree,” a landmark that others use to navigate in the prairie....
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Back in Iowa, the Hoels haven’t heard of the chestnut disaster. John continues photographing his chestnut tree every month until his sudden death at age...
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Decades pass, and Frank Jr. continues the ritual of photographing the chestnut tree every month. Frank suffers from a lack of imagination, and he never thinks deeply...
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...1965, the Brownie camera breaks, and Frank Jr. replaces it. Many years pass, and the chestnut tree keeps slowly growing while the Hoel family moves through generations. They experience the Great...
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...Nicholas Hoel is now 25 and flipping again through the book of photos of the chestnut tree, watching his entire family history “encoded somehow in that animated tree.” The photo book...
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...when he awoke, he realized that the image came from the photos of the Hoel chestnut tree.
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...snow, passing out. When he revives, he looks up and sees the branches of the chestnut tree.
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Part 2: Trunk
...Nick then shows her the flipbook with the 76 years of pictures of the family chestnut tree. Olivia recognizes it as the tree she saw from the highway.
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...do, since they “give it all away” too. Nick then leads Olivia out to the chestnut tree. He explains about the chestnut blight on the East Coast, which is why she’s...
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...that there was someone recently, but she left because of his single-minded obsession with the chestnut tree.
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...hurt and intimidate them. On his fourth night in jail, Nick dreams of the Hoel chestnut tree. In the dream, the tree laughs at humanity for trying to save it, and...
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Part 3: Crown
...himself, but he feels compelled to keep making art. Tonight’s project is painting an enormous chestnut tree on the side of a law office building. Next to it, he paints the...
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...farm. When he reaches it, he sees that the farm is now a factory. The chestnut tree is gone. Nick parks his car and approaches the dead stump, forgetting that he...
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...and finds what he is really looking for: the book of photos of the Hoel chestnut tree.
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...manager of the property and then let him get the rest of the art—including the chestnut photo book—and leave.
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...video called “Words of Air and Light.” The video shows a hundred years of a chestnut tree’s growth over the course of twenty seconds. Neelay is fascinated by the sense of...
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