Trees

Introduction

We originated in the trees—our ancient ancestors lived arboreally, and we developed the hands and limbs we have today by swinging from branch to branch. Early humans continued the relationship with trees, using them not just for food, shelter, and fuel, but also as sacred final resting sites, burying their dead within hollowed-out tree trunks. Countless cultures have a concept of a mythical world tree, a gigantic tree that connects the terrestrial world with spiritual realms. World trees are depicted as any number of species, depending on the geographic source of a specific myth, and are often shown with their branches spreading up into a divine cosmos and their roots reaching down into an underworld.

In modern times and urban settings, it’s easy to take trees for granted or even forget about them altogether. Many of us have never planted, pruned, or tended to a tree in any way. We can go all day without glimpsing so much as a single branch. And while much of our food and shelter still come from trees, we are often so removed from the harvest that we forget how much of our nourishment and other comforts originated among the branches.

While we’ve become distanced from trees in our daily lives, our scientific understanding of them is flourishing. Recently, scientists have studied the ways trees talk to each other through the transmission of invisible airborne chemicals that can trigger neighboring trees to ward off pests. Studies have shown how certain trees share nutrients through complex underground networks of roots and partnering fungi. The more arboreal mysteries that we untangle, the more we seem to discover. While it shocks mainstream culture to find that trees communicate, these discoveries hearken back to longheld Indigenous knowledge. Biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation points to a legacy of collaboration between humans and trees in which it was understood that trees talked to each other.

With more and more of us becoming city dwellers, removed from wilderness altogether, how can we find communion with the trees? While many people may no longer live in and among the forests, trees are among the largest life forms we can meet in person. A direct relationship with trees may not be possible for everyone, but learning and celebrating the ways that we know trees to be important, amazing, and beautiful is a great place to start. This book is a celebration of the diversity of trees on Earth, their evolutionary history, their surprising and sometimes strange beauty, and the ways humans have understood and interacted with them since ancient times.