AFTER THE DOCUMENTARY guys surreptitiously blow on one of the trees in hopes of getting an action shot, I head out to look at the art. Most of it is so faint that you can hardly see it, a natural imitation of Robert Ryman, that 20th-century minimalist who hung blank canvases. Later, I pull Jonathon aside and, with restraint and delicacy and no sense of desperation, ask, "Why should anyone care about this?"

"I can't tell them," he says. "I hope people are curious and the curiosity can be encouraged. But I can't force it on somebody."

OK, let's be more concrete: Trees are "naive," they might or might not be drawing, why do you care?

"Well, I realize I've made assumptions about ideas that I don't quite understand," he begins, enthusiasm accelerating his speech. "I don't really know what I mean when I say trees are 'non-sentient.' I don't know what I mean when I say 'consciousness.' "

"Consciousness is being self-aware," I say.

"Well, what do you mean by 'self-aware'? Who is the 'self' being aware of the 'self'? You wind up in a vicious regress.

"It was really at this point where the project suddenly mattered to me," Jonathon continues, "when I realized there was a thought experiment there that I didn't know I was setting up. Trees drawing explores ideas of consciousness and how that relates to ideas of intelligence, creativity, and all these terms that make us feel superior, give us some sense of being special—because the opposable-thumb thing just isn't enough for us."

Hmmm. If I've understood him correctly, which I'll bet I haven't, the root of what Jonathon is saying is this: Let's stop talking and go look at the trees again.

By four o'clock everyone has left, and by 5:15 Jonathon has placed the last easel and begins harvesting the first completed works. The wind must have picked up at some point, because the drawings are much more interesting than before.

The marks on the page run the gamut of styles, though I have to agree with the farm manager, who says, "I'm gonna go with abstract." Some are smudges, the pencil having tilted sideways a bit and rubbed back and forth in a one-inch track. More rare are the expressive trees, my favorites, which draw wildly all over the page in thin squiggles, sometimes so exuberantly that the line streaks off the paper—done! Least common are the dots. On these, the cypress has left a peppering of fine, barely visible pokes, where the sprigs must have lifted off the surface, swung over or up, and then dropped like sewing-machine needles.