Five years ago, my partner and I bought a house surrounded by open fields. Since then, as a kind of small-scale reforestation project designed to bring the forest closer, we’ve planted several dozen new trees, all native species, with a bias toward the slightly more southern and drought-tolerant varieties likely to do well in the face of rising temperatures.
It’s an enduring pleasure to watch these new beings develop their root systems, gain strength, and begin to take on height and girth. Like characters in a slowly unfolding narrative, each is beginning to take on a distinct personality. Some are robust, growing fast and proud; others are slower, patiently marshalling their resources and biding their time. A few have even begun to take on a certain stateliness, precursor to the mantle of grace and dignity they will inherit as they age.
To plant a tree is to affirm one’s faith in the future, while at the same time reckoning with the sadness inherent in the comparative brevity of a human lifespan. It is to humbly acknowledge one’s place in the cycles of natural life across the unimaginable vastness of geologic time.
As a novelist and avid reader, I’ve long been interested in literary portrayals of trees. Somewhere around my eighth birthday my parents started reading The Hobbit and all three books of The Lord of the Rings to my siblings and me, a journey that took us the better part of a year.
Tolkien’s epic quest narratives echo the dire circumstances in Europe in the interwar period, though the miasma of evil has its origin not in Nazi Germany or fascist Italy but in the realm of Mordor, from whence it rises like an inexorable black tide to overwhelm all the goodness in the world. Light is always there in the background, however, occasionally bleeding through that oppressive darkness to infuse the narrative with glimmers of hope.
Tolkien’s forests, similarly — where many of his most dramatic and evocative chapters take place — are gripping embodiments of this urgent wrestling match between darkness and light. The Old Forest, just beyond the borders of the bucolic Shire, is host not only to terrifying ring-wraiths but to uncanny and sometimes ravenously hostile ancient trees — and things get even worse in Mirkwood. But amid these forests of terror and danger there are also glades of joyous poetry and light, such as the alluring waystation of Rivendell and magical Lothlórien, where the cathedral-like spaces between the trees are filled with dappled golden light and the celestial music of elves.
Tolkien struck a resonant metaphorical chord when he introduced his readers to the Ents, sentient tree-beings of Fangorn forest, who are far older and wiser than any other creature in Middle Earth. As children my siblings and I couldn’t get enough of Treebeard, whose wise and funny aphorisms communicated not only the great wisdom of trees, but also an exhilaratingly defamiliarized perspective on time:
“Sheep get like shepherds, and shepherds like sheep, it is said; but slowly, and neither have long in the world.”
Our enchantment with Tolkien’s wise old trees was undoubtedly rooted in the author’s portrayal of them, which edged into the realm of the sublime:
“Treebeard lifted two great vessels and stood them on the table. They seemed to be filled with water; but he held his hands over them, and immediately they began to glow, one with a golden and the other with a rich, green light; and the blending of the two lights lit the bay, as if the sun of summer was shining through a roof of young leaves. Looking back, the hobbits saw that the trees in the court had also begun to glow, faintly at first, but steadily quickening, until every leaf was edged with light: some green, some gold, some red as copper; while the tree-trunks looked like pillars moulded out of luminous stone.”
Tolkien demonstrated once and for all that that along with other remarkable aspects of human life — love, heroism, death, the mysteries of the soul — our ancient association with trees is a worthy subject for literature.
Trees figure prominently in more recent novels, of course, perhaps most famously in Richard Powers’ 2018 masterpiece, The Overstory, whose presiding consciousness is actually a tree, or trees writ large.
Powers’ uniquely positioned high-omniscient narrator gives him the freedom to range backwards and forwards across great expanses of time. Three decades can go by in a single paragraph; a long-ago moment can be experienced with vivid intimacy, and we often know the fate of a character well before it comes to pass:
“At that click, a teenage Mimi lifted from her own nine-year-old shoulders to gaze up at the arhats from high up and years away. Out of the gazing teen rose another, even older woman. Time was not a line unrolling in front of her. It was a column of concentric circles with herself at the core and the present floating outward along the outermost line.”
One of the characters in The Overstory recalls reading a science fiction story about the arrival on Earth of a species of tiny, super-fast aliens. The aliens live on an accelerated timescale compared to that of humans, their movements so quick that they’re only perceptible as a faint buzzing in a person’s ears. Meanwhile, human movement is so slow that the aliens assume they’re inanimate meat statues, which they decide to harvest as food for their long homeward journey.
This dark little tale, of course, can be seen as analogous to our relationship with trees. We live on an entirely different timescale than the ancient, slow-growing beings with whom we share this planet, and we may therefore be missing something essential about them.
Trees play a key role in my new novel, The Afterlife Project, set partly in an old-growth forest of the deep future, in which trees provide nourishment, solace, and even life-giving companionship for a marooned scientist. One of the great pleasures of writing the book came from the hundreds of hours I spent in my local forest, giving my imagination free rein to dream up a fictional forest of the future.
Trees and forests are worthy subjects for human literature because they are an essential aspect of human lives. They provided the setting for our evolution as a species, and continue to be critical to the sustenance of both our bodies and spirits.
Most people know that healthy forests are key allies in taking on the grave environmental crisis we currently face. Recently, we’ve also learned that they’re helpful in improving our individual health. Being in a forest just feels good. Japan, recognizing this, has created an extensive nationwide network of forest-therapy trails, introducing the rest of the world to the concept of “forest bathing.” Clinical studies have provided insight into this phenomenon, finding that time spent walking or sitting among living trees may reduce stress, lower blood pressure, strengthen immunities, and improve our overall mental and physiological well-being.
A forest is a welcoming haven in any season. It has its own air conditioning system for one thing. On hot and muggy days near my home in Vermont the forest stays much cooler than out under the sun, and in winter, trees offer protection from the frigid winds that lash fallen snow across the open fields and roads, while the leafless canopy allows the sun to slant in, casting long shadows across the snow-blanketed understory and stage-lighting an evocative topography of snow-draped conifers and lichen-covered hardwood trunks.
And of course forests provide direct physical benefits for humans as well, as we know from lived experience here in Vermont: burned in our fireplaces and woodstoves, it heats us through the long winters; sustainably logged, it makes beautiful furniture and the very beams over our heads; tapped and boiled from our sugar maples, it brings forth one of the most deliciously sweet flavors known to humankind.
Trees are a living combination of the four elements revered in most ancient human systems of belief: earth and water by way of the mycorrhizal network that allows the tree to draw moisture and mineral nutrients from the soil, fire in the form of photosynthesis to harness the burning energy of the sun, and air in the way the wind bends but doesn’t break a tree’s trunk and branches, reinforcing its remarkably strong and flexible cellular structure.
It’s not surprising that groves and glades have long been considered sacred. As John Fowles wrote in his book-length essay, The Tree:
“We know that the very first holy places in Neolithic times … were artificial groves made of felled, transported and re-erected tree trunks; and that their roofs must have seemed to their makers less roofs than artificial leaf-canopies.”
A true forest is a sacred space built not by humans but by nature itself. Walking through one, any receptive person can experience the intrinsic holiness of the physical world. Toward the end of his life, the novelist Herman Hesse wrote:
“A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.”
Trees, it seems, may be messengers of a sort: stately, long-lived healers whose presence in our surroundings reminds us of our connection to the ineffable, while at the same time offering a way out of the environmental and spiritual degradation we’ve subjected ourselves to in our long, self-imposed exile from the heart of nature.
And it seems that humanity may finally be getting the message. My social media feeds are filled with the accounts of tree-worshippers and rewilding organizations like “@bigtreehunter” and “@americanforests” and “@trees_boston.” Granted, this could just be the algorithms at work — I love trees and forests and am attuned to others who feel the same — but I’m also seeing tree-related stories in the news media with more and more frequency.
For me, this resurgence of interest in these ancient beings is cause for celebration and for hope: celebration that despite the damage we’ve done to our planetary ecology trees remain among us, and we among them; hope that the beauty, mystery, and wisdom they embody will continue to exist for many new generations of humanity to care for and enjoy.
A Helping Hand for Mangroves
