When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, higher than the ordinary, and shutting out the sky with their thickly inter-twined branches, do not the stately shadows of the wood, the stillness of the place, and the awful gloom of this doomed cavern then strike you with the presence of a deity?

Larger and finer meanings are read into the older legends of the plants, and the universality of certain myths is expressed in the concurrence of ideas in the beginnings of the great religions.   One of the first figures in the leading cosmologies is a tree of life guarded by a serpent.  In the Judaic faith this was the tree in the
garden of Eden; the Scandinavians made it an ash, Ygdrasil;  Christians usually specify the tree as an apple, Hindus as a soma, Persians as a homa, Cambodians as a talok; this early tree is the vine of Bacchus, the snake-entwined caduceus of Mercury, the twining creeper of the Eddas, the bohidruma of Buddha, the fig of Isaiah, the tree of Aesculapius with the serpent around his trunk.

There's a tree that grows in Brooklyn.  Some people call it the Tree of Heaven.  No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree, which struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded up plots and out of neglected rubbish heaps.  It grows up out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly ... survives without sun, water and seemingly without earth. It would be considered beautiful except that there are too many of it.

“As the sap rises in the trees
As the sap rises in the trees a
violent green

So rises the wrath of Nature’s
Creatures
At man”

Stevie Smith “Alone in the woods”

 ***

I see a million hills green with crop-yielding trees and a million neat farm homes snuggled in the hills.  These beautiful tree farms hold the hills from Boston to Austin, from Atlanta to Des Moines.  The hills of my vision have farming that fits them and replaces the poor pasture, the gullies, and the abandoned lands that characterize today so large a part of these hills.

In Paul Friedrich's book Proto-Indo-European Trees he identifies the "semantic primitives" of the Indo-European tribe of languages through a group of words that have not changed much through twelve thousand years - and those are tree names: especially birch, willow, adler, elm, ash, apple and beech (bher, wyt, alysos, ulmo, os, abul, bhago).  Seed syllables, bija, of the life of the west.

Spirituality automatically leads to humility.  When a flower develops into a fruit, the petals drop off on its own.   When one becomes spiritual, the ego vanishes gradually on its own.   A tree laden with fruits always bends low.  Humility is a sign of greatness.

Since humans first utilized wood for fire, tools and utensils, certain trees have held a special significance as both practical providers and powerful spiritual presences. The specific trees varied between different cultures and geographic areas, but those held to be 'sacred' shared certain traits in common - unusual size or beauty, the wide range of materials they provided, unique physical characteristics, or simply the power of the tree's spirit could grant it a central place in the folklore and mythology of a culture. Even today, certain trees capture our imagination. The majestic oak, the ancient yew, the evergreens we bring into our homes each winter - all are reminders of the power that trees can have in our lives.

We advocate that all standing armies everywhere be used for the work of essential reafforestation, in the first instance, in the countries to which they belong, and that each country, as it is able to spare men, shall provide expeditionary forces to co-operate in the greater tasks of Land Reclamation in the Sahara and other deserts.

Each generation takes the earth as trustees. We ought to bequeath to posterity as many forests and orchards as we have exhausted and consumed.

“The cultivation of trees is the cultivation of the good, the beautiful, and the ennobling in man, and for one, I wish to see it become universal.”

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanates from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.

"Walking among the great redwoods is essentially an experience of verticality. All other trees are small next to them; even the long, elegant Douglas fir must be gauged by another standard. There is a gloom at the base of these giants; but one that is tempered by a calming tranquility. Sunlight filters down through shades of greenish gray to an almost smoky dark. The forest floor is covered with a soft carpet of ferns. A palpable intimacy is everywhere. A quiet different from the quiet of the outside world insinuates itself. Great trees stand in the semiclosed shaded rooms of the forest. It is profound and perfectly still, like the quiet one imagines at the center of sleep.

“The world is threatened by growing population, but it is also, even perhaps to a greater extent, threatened by the exploding appetites of the already rich.”

People in suburbia see trees differently than foresters do.  They cherish every one. It is useless to speak of the probability that a certain tree will die when the tree is in someone's backyard ....   You are talking about a personal asset, a friend, a monument, not about board feet of lumber.

The grove is the centre of their whole religion. It is regarded as the cradle of the race and the dwelling-place of the supreme god to whom all things are subject and obedient.

“When you spend half your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment ….. it’s exciting to have a real crisis on your hands.”

www.the-tree.org.uk