Trees for Thought

12 Authors Who Love Trees More Than Your Average Tree Lover.

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Julia “Butterfly” Hill

In the late 90s a young activist named Julia “Butterfly” Hill so loved a tree—a 200-foot-tall California redwood—that to protect it from the raging engines of progress, she literally took up residence in its uppermost branches. For two years.

“I gave my word to this tree,” she said.

Walt Whitman

Trees and humans share something profound and original, each birth-children of the earth, grandchildren of the stars. “Surely there is something more in each of the trees, some living soul,” wrote Walt Whitman.

Whitman, though Brooklyn-raised, closely adhered to the 19^th-century New England transcendentalist movement, which held that the divine was to be seen and touched not so much in church as in nature and in the self. “I hold on boughs or slender trees caressingly there in the sun and shade... and know the virtue thereof passes from them into me.”

Mary Oliver

The poet Mary Oliver, whose works are fully immersed in nature, spent so much time in the woods that she would hide pencils in the knots of trees so as not to be caught short when inspiration came.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves

and call out, “Stay awhile.”

The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It's simple,” they say,

“and you too have come

into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled

with light, and to shine.

Do as I do, advises the tree. And what is that? Very simple: Be yourself! And yet so many of us worry and fret all our lives trying to be something other than what we are, or trying to figure out who we are. Does the tree suffer such existential angst? Or is she content to heed to her true nature? “It lives in my imagination strongly that the black oak is pleased to be a black oak,” writes Oliver in her essay, Upstream.

Me

I was recently sipping a coffee beside a peaceful young red maple in Little Compton, Rhode Island. The tree grew undisturbed along the edge of an old mill pond, its roots clinging securely to the edge of the steep shallow bank. After a short time, I sensed the tree looking at me. It was so quietly residing there beside me that I’d barely given it a thought. I felt bad for ignoring the tree. “Hello, tree,” I said. “I’m sorry I ignored you. You look very fine this morning.”

The tree smiled and went back to its reverie.

Henry Beston

Residents of Cape Cod can take pride in dozens of titles focused on our unique spit of land, including Robert Finch’s Common Ground: A Naturalist’s Cape Cod, Thoreau’s Cape Cod, and Henry Beston’s The Outermost House.

What does Beston, who wrote about his solitary year in an Eastham dune shack, think of our trees? Not much, I’m afraid. The pitch pine, which has “rooted itself into the windswept bar,” is, in his opinion, of “no particular interest or beauty.” Oh, Henry. You devote an entire chapter to the varied voices and unruly ways of the waves on the “great beach of Cape Cod,” and we thank you for your ornithological virtuosity, but just a little something on trees, please?

Oh, well. Though the pitch pine may be a “washashore” like so many of my fellow Cape Codders, myself included, I admire it for its tenacity; it’s been here a long time, and will grow just about anywhere. The Sandwich Glass Company and the West Barnstable Brick Company consumed thousands of acres of pitch pine throughout the 1800s to fire their furnaces, and yet here it thrives, not unlike the Portuguese immigrants who formed the backbone of our fishing industry, and the current growing Brazilian population, whose culinary offerings are quickly taking root in restaurants from Falmouth to Provincetown.

Henry David Thoreau

I loved climbing trees in my youth. I’m sure I share the memory with many. There’s probably an online group for former tree-climbers! If there is, we will add as an honorary member my favorite author and philosopher, Henry David Thoreau, who advises us to “elevate ourselves a little more,” in his essay, “Walking.”. “We might climb a tree, at least.”

My childhood home in southeastern Massachusetts was surrounded by tall white pines; stately but pitchy, not the best for climbing. Thoreau and I share a love for the eastern white pine, Pinus strobus. And we were both, though a hundred years apart, willing to get our hands dirty climbing its branches: “...though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before.”

Italo Calvino

But imagine spending the rest of your life in a tree! I only discovered Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees recently, about a boy who in defiance of his father’s tyrannizing at the dinner table leaps out the window into a nearby tree and never touches his feet to the ground again.

Richard Powers

Digging into Richard Powers’ The Overstory, a commitment of time for sure, was time well spent. How could I not read a whole novel devoted to the love of trees? Its chapters alone are a testament to the subject of the book’s devotion: “Roots,” “Trunk,” “Crown,” and “Seeds.”

One of the book’s primary characters is based on the Canadian forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, who has famously studied and advanced the idea that trees communicate with one another, even across species.

“There is a necessary wisdom in the give-and-take of nature—its quiet agreements and search for balance. There is an extraordinary generosity,” she writes in Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

Annie Dillard, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson

This theme of coexistence and interconnectedness is reflected again and again in the greatest books on nature and the environment:

 “I am sitting under a sycamore by Tinker Creek. I am really here, alive on the intricate earth under trees. But under me, directly under the weight of my body on the grass, are other creatures, just as real, for whom also this moment, this tree, is ‘it.’”

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.”

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

“The earth's vegetation is part of a web of life in which there are intimate and essential relations between plants and the earth, between plants and other plants, between plants and animals.”

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

Me again, and my good friend Gautama Buddha

I’d like to visit the “Bodhi Tree” in India, beneath which a young man named Gautama Siddhartha became the Buddha, though I probably never will, as there are so many other wonderful trees for me to visit first. I would love to see the General Sherman Tree, the largest-known tree by volume in the world, in California's Sequoia National Park. A friend recently moved to Hawaii, where, in Lahaina, a single Banyan tree with 46 trunks of its own survived the recent wildfire, though not unscathed. I would like to see that as well. And there is an inconsequential pine tree overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Middletown, Rhode Island that gave me much pleasure some years ago; it’s getting time for another visit.

But back for a moment to that Bodhi Tree. The Buddha realized total freedom beneath this tree, a fig species not yet known as the “tree of enlightenment.” The tree growing there today is believed to be a direct descendent of the original, and many continue to pilgrimage to the site, likely in the hopes of absorbing some leftover wisdom from the Buddha, who last visited about 2500 years ago.

A member of my meditation group recently visited this sacred tree, which he identified as Ficus religiosa, and brought back some leaves and seeds, which he passed around. I would like to say I felt something...

Let’s just say I did.

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

I keep a triplet of pitch pine cones, still fastened firmly to a thick piece of rough twig, on the dashboard of my truck, which can certainly engender feelings of fellowship with my allies the trees—whenever I notice it still lying there amidst the gathering dust.

But there is no substitute for real live engagement with a real live tree. There are many trees to choose from, for sure, but the most important tree, like the most important person, is the one right in front of you. Climb it, talk to it, sit under it, hug it, gaze up into its branches; at least once a week if not every day. I guarantee you will find, at the very least, a brief moment of peace. And what could be better than a moment of peace?

Maybe two moments.

Go ahead, take two moments. You deserve it!

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BOOKS MENTIONED

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Julia “Butterfly” Hill, The Legacy of Luna

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Mary Oliver, Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver; Upstream

Henry Beston, The Outermost House

Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod; “Walking”; Walden

Robert Finch, Common Ground: a Naturalist’s Cape Cod

Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

Richard Powers, The Overstory

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching

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All photos by Don Boivin unless otherwise credited

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