On Trees

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone - Herman Hesse

As a member of The Woodland Trust, I regularly signed petitions to preserve ancient woodlands and unique trees. Does this make a difference? The battle is an ongoing one, but worth fighting, if necessary tree by tree.

“I wonder about the trees,” Robert Frost wrote. Monumental in size, alive but inert, they inhabit a different temporality than ours. Some species’ life spans can be measured in human generations. We wake to find that a tree’s leaves have turned, or register, come spring, its sturdier trunk. But such changes are always perceived after the fact. We’ll never see them unfold, with our own eyes, in human time.

Walt Whitman saw in trees the wisest of teachers and Hermann Hesse found in them a joyous antidote to the sorrow of our own ephemerality, notes Maria Popova, who also points to the inspirational work of Wangari Maathai, the the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded for her triumph of promoting “ecologically viable social, economic and cultural development” by founding the Green Belt Movement, and responsible for planting 30 million trees and empowering women to partake in social change. 

There is even a Green Man-like "Thinking Tree" in Puglia, Italy.

No one has been able to capture this 3,200-year-old tree in one image before – until now.

Further thoughts on trees:

• The earliest evidence of wood being used for structural purposes dates back to at least 476,000 years ago.
• The planting of single-species trees has been promoted as a method for addressing global warming. But some doubt the benefits of such ambitious plans as the plants can replace complex ecosystems with monoculture plantations, Al Jazeera reports. Scientists from universities in South Africa and the UK point to Ghana as an example, where once diverse forests "have now transformed into homogenous masses", making them "highly vulnerable to diseases and negatively impacts local biodiversity," one researcher told AFP news agency.
• Even if you haven’t been to the woods lately, you probably know that the forest is disappearing. In the past ten thousand years, the Earth has lost about a third of its forest, which wouldn’t be so worrying if it weren’t for the fact that almost all that loss has happened in the past three hundred years or so. As much forest has been lost in the past hundred years as in the nine thousand before. With the forest go the worlds within those woods, each habitat and dwelling place, a universe within each rotting log, a galaxy within a pine cone. And, unlike earlier losses of forests, owing to ice and fire, volcanoes, comets, and earthquakes, nearly all the destruction in the past three centuries has been done deliberately, by people, warned The New Yorker.
• Tree planting seems like a wholesome, tidy way to make up for carbon emission. Take a flight? Plant a tree. Emissions: gone. But reforestation has gone from a radical political movement to a "convenient corporate gimmick" to encourage conscience-free consumption in the age of climate change. Not only is tree planting not that helpful in offsetting carbon emissions - it might even be counterproductive, argued Quartz.
• Three “trillion-tree” campaigns have been launched by business leaders and charities in the past decade, alongside more than a hundred government planting pledges. The movement has gathered momentum so quickly there is now a global seed shortage. Tallying exactly how many trees or how much land has been promised is impossible because the campaigns are all unclear about how their individual targets overlap with each other. A report said governments were separately aiming to plant and restore an area almost four times the size of India.
• Companies from across sectors are working together through the World Economic Forum’s 1t.org initiative, which serves the global movement to conserve, restore and grow 1 trillion trees by 2030. More than 80 companies have pledged over 7 billion trees in over 65 countries.
• Hermann Hesse believed that trees are our greatest spiritual teachers. Walt Whitman cherished them as paragons of authenticity amid a world of mere appearances. Paul Klee meanwhile believed that an artist is like a tree, noted Maria Popova. 
• Green cover in Europe is dropping, due in part to many trees reaching the end of their lives, the Guardian warned, but metro lines, underground parking, architectural preservation and the cost of installing and maintaining trees are limiting planting. One new tree can cost cities up to €2,000 over five years, Portuguese researchers found. But, trees help with air purification, carbon reduction, water runoff and can add to property values. They also provide shade, lower temperatures and can help to reduce bills for cooling. In Lisbon, researchers found that the city's 40,000 trees may cost €1.75m every year, but they provide services worth around €7.76m.
• A study claimed that large numbers of historical forests could be wiped out by climate change. The authors of Global Field Observations of Tree Die-Off used a database of climate-induced forest death events dating back to 1970 to study forest adaptation to warmer temperatures. Their models showed that at 2C of warming, forest die-off events will become 22% more frequent. At 4C of warming, that leaps to 140% more frequent.
• The amount of forest lost to fire annually has doubled across the last 20 years. This includes forest lost both to wildfires and fires that were intentionally set. In 2021, nine million hectares of forest burned; that amounts to an area the size of Portugal, or 16 football pitches every minute.
• Companies and countries that made tree-planting promises may ultimately be doing more environmental harm than good. Billions of trees were planted globally last year based on their good intentions, warned The New York Times, but some are carpeting "large areas with commercial, nonnative species" that are damaging. Instead, they should be thoughtfully planting trees that are "a positive for biodiversity,
• Right now, around the world, trees are on the move. Some scientists prefer the phrase “shifts in range” to “migration” when it comes to forests - ecosystems defined by long-lived, woody beings that cannot pull up their roots from beneath the forest floor and walk or swim or fly when conditions around them indicate it is time to do so. But trees do move, they simply do it through successive generations. Trees reproduce primarily through seed dispersal, relying upon animals, winds, and waters to carry their offspring to fertile soils where they might anchor into the ground and germinate. 
• A study claimed that the Amazon rainforest is close to a tipping point that will trigger a massive wave of tree dieback, and turn the forest into a savannah. Published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the paper presented evidence to show that across the last three decades the rainforest had become dramatically less resilient to extreme events such as drought and wildfires. The research was based on an analysis of satellite images. Soon, warned lead researcher Dr Chris Boulton, large parts of the forest may stop recovering from those kind of events, which are becoming more frequent. The consequences could be severe: a massive dump of carbon into the atmosphere that would escalate global mean temperatures.
• Beronda Montgomery, author of Lessons from Plants , notes that the healing of wounds in trees – the closing off or protective sealing off of a tissue, and the ensuing construction of new living paths inclusive of sugar-transporting phloem tissues and water-passing xylem structures – allows the continued pursuit of a tree’s core purpose. This wound-healing paradigm exemplifies that, to remain alive, some paths have to be closed and new possibilities pursued.
• For Henry David Thoreau, trees were creative and spiritual companions, sane-making and essential. His love of them is documented in Thoreau and the Language of Trees -  a selection of his meditations on trees, drawn from his two-million-word journal by writer and photographer Richard Higgins.
• In 1821, John Constable went out on to Hampstead Heath, set up his easel and looked closely at an elm tree. He observed the weathering across its bark, the lichen around its base, the moss clinging to its roots; he looked at the water stains that ran down its sides, its canopy of toothed celadon-green leaves and its purple-black buds. He spent around forty hours over a few weeks lavishing attention on an object to which most of us have never accorded more than a minute.
• A new event venue in Finland’s is supported by 95 trees. The Pikku-Finlandia in Helsinki is also fully transportable and recyclable.
• Aspens form stands of clonal trees, where each tree is genetically identical. Pando, an aspen stand in southern Utah, USA, spans 108 acres. Experts consider it to be the world’s largest organism by weight.  Over recent decades, Pando has been shrinking, unable to keep up with persistent over-browsing by deer and cattle. Now the genetically uniform entity is beginning to break up because of human interventions.  
• The effort to restore Pando will inform conservation projects worldwide.
• Trees believed to pre-date the pyramids are in danger of being lost forever unless they are given special legal protections, campaigners warned. The UK is home to the world's largest collection of ancient yew trees, with some estimated by researchers to be as old as 5,000 years old, such as Powys' Defynnog Yew, yet yews currently have no extra protections than any other trees.
• The Welsh reportedly have a saying. "Dod yn ôl at fy nghoed". It means returning to a balanced state of mind. It literally translates as "Going back to my trees".
• The 'messy' alternative to tree-planting explained the value of natural forest regeneration. Distinct from active tree-planting, trees are allowed to grow back spontaneously, or with limited human intervention, on land where the original forest cover had been cleared for uses such as agriculture or destroyed by fire.
• In an in-depth interview, Dr. Suzanne Simard -  the scientist who discovered the “wood-wide web” - speaks about mother trees, kin recognition, and how to heal our separation from the living world.
• Scientists proposed 10 golden rules for tree-planting, which they say must be a top priority for all nations in the 2020s. Tree planting is a brilliant solution to tackle climate change and protect biodiversity, but the wrong tree in the wrong place can do more harm than good, said experts at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The rules include protecting existing forests first and involving locals.
• There is growing interest in growing trees and maintaining woodlands, to the point where the likes of Brewdog have pledged to grow their own forest as a way to invest in carbon sequestration.
• For Henry David Thoreau, trees were creative and spiritual companions, sane-making and essential. His love of them comes alive in Thoreau and the Language of Trees — a selection of his meditations on trees, drawn from his two-million-word journal by writer and photographer Richard Higgins, whose black-and-white photographs complement Thoreau’s arboreal writings.
• Psyche suggests that we think of an individual tree as a new acquaintance  - we can get to know its bark and its leaves, and its roots that snake along the ground. We can consider how it changes with the seasons – is it deciduous or coniferous, growing leaves in spring or putting on new growth? We can touch it, smell it, look carefully at the other species that colonise it: ants, ladybirds, birds. We can try and find out where it came from. Most of all, we can be with the tree, take the time to sit under it or stand next to it and really see it for what it is. 
• Underneath forests, fungal links create a network that connects trees to one another, even ones from different species, and allows them to share information. Ferris Jabrs’ account in the New York Times analysed how trees stay in touch - and what they share with one another.
• After visiting a two-thousand-year-old linden tree in England, William Bryant Logan explored the nearly forgotten practices of coppicing and pollarding, or cutting back a tree to stimulate growth, and discovered a symbiotic relationship between humans and trees.
• The writer Maria Popova says that trees are unworded thoughts, periscopes of perspective. They are both less alive than we think and more sentient than we thought. In them, we see what we are and see what we can be. From them, we draw our best metaphors for love, for art, for happiness.
• In an extended meditation on the relationship between place and intimacy, the body and the word, Carl Phillips walked among trees to explore what can and cannot be known.
• Over the next decade, Salesforce plans to conserve and restore 100 million trees. Mastercard plans to reach the same number in five years. Timberland is also planting trees: 50 million of them. Clif Bar is adding 750,000. Microsoft, which plans to invest in reforestation as one piece of a strategy to become carbon negative, is developing technology for conservation organisations. The companies are among 26 businesses, organisations, and cities that make up the new U.S. chapter of 1t.org, the movement to plant and conserve a trillion trees globally. The new group is coordinating pro-forest efforts that have grown quickly over the last few years. It’s designed to accelerate work to protect and plant trees, but also to make sure it happens strategically, reported Fast Company. 
• Challenging us to travel to spend time with memorable trees, Salon argued that "our species doesn't have a great track record with trees.  Even a cursory look into the oldest, most interesting trees in recorded history reveals stories of thousand-year-old trees getting turned into picnic tables, a solitary tree in the middle of the Sahara getting run over by a drunk truck driver, and virgin European forests being decimated by the Romans for firewood and building materials."
• Further reading on trees:
  • 11 of Britain's most legendary trees
  • A day in the life of an oak tree, from mistle thrush in the morning to mice at midnight
  • A Day in the Life of Trees
  • A focus on the apple tree
  • An early warning system for tree health
  • Ancient and Sacred trees
  • Ancient woodlands are more vital than ever - Notes from Hear and Far
  • Britain’s trees are being felled by diseases
  • British trees: folklore and mythology
  • Calculating the Incalculable: Thoreau on the True Value of a Tree
  • Campfire destroys ancient white-leaved Oak revered by pagans
  • Deforestation: Which countries are still cutting down trees?
  • Discover woods in Autumn
  • Drawing a Tree: on the Existential Poetics of Diversity and Resilience Through the Art and Science of Trees
  • Forest Service Recommends Hugging Trees While You Can’t Hug Others
  • Global Forest Watch map
  • Heartful hawthorn
  • In effort to combat clouds of pollen, allergy brand Claritin plants female trees
  • Hearing the Language of Trees
  • Holly - Restoring the Spirit of the Land
  • Lumberjacks sell bigleaf maple trunks on the black market for a handsome fee
  • Never Underestimate the Intelligence of Trees - Nautilus
  • New study disproves Leonardo da Vinci's 'rule of trees'
  • Not just sticks of carbon - how growing trees for the climate must also benefit biodiversity
  • On how plants "talk" with one another
  • On the consolations and lessons of nature
  • On passion, wildness and disorder
  • On making life from death
  • On the life and death of trees
  • On how human bodies can become trees
  • On why trees are good for our health
  • On the secret life of trees
  • Monumental trees worldwide
  • Planting trees alone will not stop global warming - Financial Times
  • Remarkable Trees Throughout The World
  • The church forests of Ethiopia - Emergence Magazine
  • The Mesmerising Microscopy of Trees: Otherworldly Images Revealing the Cellular Structure of Wood Specimens
  • Shorter lifespan of faster-growing trees will add to climate crisis
  • Should this tree have the same rights as you? - Robert Macfarlane
  • Tree of the year 2024
  • The Fascinating Science of How Trees Communicate, Animated - Brain Pickings
  • The Remarkable Story of the Dawn Redwood: How a Living Fossil Brought Humanity Together in the Middle of a World War - The Marginalian
  • The secret social life of trees
  • Thimmamma Marrimanu: The world’s largest single tree canopy - BBC
  • Time to Take Up: Forest Bathing - eventbrite
  • The Social Life of Forests - New York Times
  • The senseless vandalism at Sycamore Gap.
  • They carry us with them - the great tree migration
  • Trees at Night: Stunning Rorschach Silhouettes from the 1920s
  • Walk with trees
  • Walking app helps tree lovers know their sycamores from their maples - The Guardian
  • What if everyone in the world planted a tree? - BBC
  • What you really need to know before you prune your trees
  • Why plant trees?
  • World’s oldest trees reveal the largest solar storm in history