There's Something About Trees

 

Trees.

There is just something about trees.

It is no coincidence that most of the stories I have written in my collection The Wishing Tree and Other Dreams features trees in one way or another.  I would have liked to feature a tree as the central character or plot point in every story in this collection, or hidden them as secret symbols, rather like in Where's Wally or The Da Vinci Code, but stories have a way of writing themselves and sometimes they insisted they simply did not have room for a tree.  So that was that.

So, what is it about trees that is so beguiling?

For me, it is many things.  Their great age.  Their meditative, quiet presence.  Their implacability.  The way they seem to listen.  The sound of the wind hissing through their leaves.  Their endurance of the seasons, and of human history.  Their beauty, and strangeness.  The way they provide a home for entire ecosystems, including ours.  Their ineffable spirit.  Their outbreath exchanged with out inbreath.  Their leaves and flowers and bark, chock full of medicine; their fruit and nuts and berries and sticky sap; the smell of cedar, of creeping moss, of lichens and healed wounds and calloused ancient skin.  Sitting on a branch in the canopy and feeling the independent swing and heft of the limbs, like rocking and balancing on the mast of a living ship.  Trees give us a much-needed different perspective: the long view across time and distance.  Trees are my inspiration.  Trees are, literally, a part of me, and I of them.  This is true for all of us.  Forests are the lungs of the earth.

When I wrote The Wishing Tree, (inspired by the Australian Fig, and the story image-for-image lifted straight from a dream) I upset a friend with my description of the tree being burned by fire.  But I think she missed the point.  This particular tree yearned for the fire; it needed fire to bloom, and it needed the ash to regenerate, and it was time for the tree to be born again from its golden seeds.  In that way, it was a little like the eucalyptus or gum tree, whose sap is flammable;  it is designed to burnt fast and hot, and regenerate equally fast, restoring the forest with new growth and the soil with its ashen nutrients.   In my story, the question arises, who is doing the wishing?  Is it the tree wishing for regeneration, or the children wishing for the safety of home, or the unspeakable creatures who pursue them wishing for food to survive?  Or all of the above?  Take a look at these amazing photos of ancient trees; there are at least three landscapes that could have been lifted straight from my story: http://www.boredpanda.com/ancient-tree-photography-beth-moon/

Forest fires are very distressing, especially those in Australia, where huge swathes of bush are destroyed, along with much wildlife.  But I understand that this is the inevitable result of the land not being burned more frequently in a controlled fashion, as the nomadic Aborigines originally used to do, with their innate understanding of the unique needs of their wild home. 

Even more distressing, to my mind, is the deliberate destruction brought about by human beings.  Us.  I hate reading about such troubling things, so I'm not going to write about this here.  I get very upset watching endless documentaries about our incredible natural world which inevitably end with how we are destroying it.  Even my long-time hero David Attenborough is guilty of this, and while I understand the purpose of raising awareness, I wonder what the point of that awareness is if we are not given a single idea about how to prevent this from happening?  I suppose the BBC is not allowed to promote any particular organisation, but by abstaining from any suggestions of helpful action (e.g. buy a swathe of forest) it all seems futile.  I don't know about anyone else, but I just end up feeling a bit depressed. That is why I am including the link to an excellent, watchable video of Prince Ea, and why I am now the proud supporter of https://standfortrees.org/en/, an organisation I didn't even know existed until today.  I know it's not quite this simple: I have seen documentaries where people visit the piece of Amazonian forest they now own only to find local people still chopping it down; I know these local people need to feed their families.  But it's a damn good place to start.  You can also buy pieces of forest to support wildlife corridors across the world, and conservation projects.

Here is the promised video link: https://www.facebook.com/PrinceEaHipHop/videos/10153278998454769/?pnref=story
Unfortunately it only seems to be viewable on Facebook.  If you don't have Facebook, please find someone who does, just to watch this!

Some extraordinary photos of the endless variety of tree bark: http://www.brainpickings.org/2010/11/02/cedric-pollet-bark/

I'd like to know what you love most about trees....

It is as I told you, Young Sapling.

It will take
autumns of patience
before you snag
your
first
moon

  

 "Old Elm Speaks" from OLD ELM SPEAKS: TREE POEMS by Kristine O'Connell George

 

I also recommend 'Into the Forest: an anthology of Tree Poems' by Mandy Haggith