A Better Way to Look at Trees
This article was published online on June 17, 2021.
Above all else in the plant kingdom, trees make good trellises for our self-regarding thoughts. Robert Frost knew this when he wrote “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” A woodland is the right spot to yield to reflection. Though the life of a tree has little in common with the life of a person, we are accustomed to approaching trees on personal, even introspective, terms. As trunk is a synonym for torso, as branch can be interchangeable with limb, trees of great variety (especially the old ones) give body to human concerns.
Consider the coastal eucalyptus, forced by sea winds to grow prostrate along the ground—how the maxim “Better bend than break” takes shape in its supplicating posture. Or meditate on Sakura, the cherry blossom, and its instructive transience. We look to trees for their symbolism, and to have our own comparatively stunted existence put into perspective. High up in the Sierra Nevada mountains, bristlecone pines preside—seemingly more stone than wood, partly fossilized. Some rise from saplings at a tempo so slow that they endure through generations, even whole civilizations—thousands of years—living off the ephemeral sustenance that all trees rely on: light, water, a smattering of nutrients drawn from the soil. These ancient pines have been called sages and sentinels, as though it were their edict to stand watch over cycles of human progress and folly.
[From the August 1897 issue: John Muir on the American forests]
Yet have we ever really, sums up the paradigm shift and captures the tone of awed revelation shared by researchers and readers alike. What a tree —tree botany in its essentials—feels utterly changed. Will our self-centered thoughts, as we stand in the never-silent forest, change too, and how?
