Vertical farming promises perfect berries through engineered control, but tech culture’s obsession with optimization and certainty is ill-suited to the messy, relational realities of growing real food.

I decided to classify my own traits and living history against the entry for Quercus alba (White Oak), one of my very favorite trees of life, transposing the categories into cultural explainers to the human community, interspersing and analyzing myself with the jargon and eyes of a horticulturalist.