Trees Never a Crowd

Writers and the enchantment of the forest

I think that I shall never see 
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps unless the billboards fall
I'll never see a tree at all.
(Ogden Nash)

This was a favourite not-really-nonsense rhyme beloved of my father. And how prescient was Nash’s vision of a treeless world!

Today, I want to talk about trees and their appeal for writers through the ages, all the way from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Richard Powers’ The Overstory. The notion was prompted by a visit last Saturday to a fabled garden in County Wicklow, just south of my home in Dublin, Kilmacurragh House.

Rhododendron Tree at Kilmacurragh

Our guide led us through the paths pointing to the massive rhododendrons reputed to be one of the best collections in Europe from the mountain kingdoms of Sikkim, Bhutan and Nepal. Further along we saw myrtle, redwood and fragrant laurel. Surprisingly, many of the transplanted trees do better here than in their native habitats. A dark and ancient yew is thought to date from the time of a medieval monastery on the site.

Beauty and splendour are wonderful indeed but because I have no head for facts and figures, unless animated by a human story, I can tell you nothing specific about these botanical rarities. Instead, I recall the anecdotes about the collectors and how they came to find or name a particular tree. Chief among them were a brother and sister, Thomas and Janet Acton. He inherited the Cromwellian estate in 1850 and, together with his sister, set off around the world in search of rare and exotic specimens for their garden. They even managed a pony trek through Yosemite.

Their correspondence, however, reveals that they didn’t get along too well. If I were a writer of historical fiction I think that snapshot of squabbling siblings making perilous expeditions to remote places would provide the seed (sorry!) of a period novel or costume drama. Maybe writers are like collectors, always on the look-out for a good story.     

     O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
     Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
     (WB Yeats ‘Among Schoolchildren’)

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Why have trees inspired so many myths, beliefs and stories? Is it their scale, their longevity, their leaves, fruits or nuts? Could it be their life cycle, which, especially in deciduous varieties, is a calendar of the seasons, proceeding from buds to blossom, from summer foliage to fiery autumnal hues, fading to bare branches in winter, only to bud again in spring? Or is it something more?

Our ancestors saw magic all around perceiving their natural environment as an expression of a spirit realm and trees hold a special place in that world view. We still speak, albeit figuratively, of the tree of life and the tree of knowledge. The Buddha achieved enlightenment under a sacred fig tree. In Norse cosmology the world is encompassed by a sacred ash tree, Yggdrassill, while for the ancient Celts a tree was the door to the underworld.

Classical literature is replete with magical or symbolic trees. In Homer’s Odyssey the hero carves his marriage bed from olive wood which re-roots itself in the earth, making the bed unshakeable. A recurrent motif in the Metamorphoses is of women transformed into trees, often as a punishment, much as Ariel in Shakespeare’s The Tempest was locked into a tree by the witch Sycorax. Many cultures have fairy or wishing trees where even today people tie rags and prayers on the branches, and recently people have taken to hanging their infants’ soothers on trees in a ritual of growing up. (A travesty given that the plastic won’t rot the way the rags do.)

Goodbye Baby

And so from the trees to the woods, which are often represented as haunted or hostile places, like those in the cautionary tales collected by the brothers Grimm, or as a stand-in for disorientation and despair when Dante loses his way in mid-life. Sometimes, however, like the Forest of Arden, they afford refuge from civilisation, leading to reconciliation and in the case of Wagner’s Siegfried the woodland protects the hero’s innocence and ignorance of fear. Belatedly the forest has become the locus of anxiety in our new genre of eco-writing which is both a lament for, and protest at, the destruction of our natural environment.

In The Overstory, Powers blends a modern, scientific understanding of how trees communicate and propagate with the ancient druidic or mystical concept of their spiritual life. Put another way, our botanical science is shown to be a modern version of the ancients’ intuitive understanding that trees possess a wisdom we have barely tapped. His characters connect with trees to compensate for a shortcoming, grief or pain in themselves. They learn from the trees, through moments of revelation, or epiphany, as Joyce would have it.

There are trees that spread like fireworks and trees that rise like cones. Trees that shoot without a ripple, three hundred feet straight skyward. Broad, pyramidal, rounded, columnar, conical, crooked: the only thing they do in common is branch like Vishnu waving his many arms.   

(The Overstory)

It’s not just the biological life of the trees, their sensitivity to a footfall in the forest, the nurse logs that host new life, the array of beneficial properties in their leaves, bark and seeds but their emblematic possibilities that, I think, have fascinated seers, artists and writers for centuries. In the quote from The Overstory Powers inserts architectural terms that conjure human interaction with the otherworld, ‘pyramidal’ and ‘columnar’, culminating in the image of the Hindu god Vishnu, the creator.

The description of trees that ‘spread like fireworks’, resonates with the irony that every year wildfire destroys forests. Power’s use of a watery image, ‘ripple’, in the next sentence helps to counteract that hellish vision. All five elements are present here. In addition to fire and water, the trees are earthbound, the sky is air, and spirit is present in the god. The trees are fully realised self-sustaining entities, endowed with a life that intrigues and mystifies us. Neelay, the character whose point of view this is, models a computer game on them only to realise later that the game is a poor imitation of their complex form.

All our fantasies, beliefs, paintings and stories about trees may be strategies to capture and tame these massive creatures whose forms are so elegant, powerful and necessary to our survival. Like others of their class and generation, the Actons collected their specimens as ornaments, and in a competitive spirit. But with that pride came knowledge and preservation of some species.

As I planned this newsletter I recalled having many years ago written a short story that featured a tree in another County Wicklow estate, Avondale. The owner was also a collector and father to Charles Stuart Parnell, the great advocate of Irish home rule. I’ll post it on Friday!

Meanwhile, I’d love to read your thoughts on trees, real, mythological or fictional.

Before I go, a footnote on billboards:

A new advertisement for financial services has popped up around town lately. The slogan is ‘Accounts and Accountability’ and hovering in the background is a young couple in Regency attire. I have no idea which financial institution is being touted but I am pretty sure Jane Austen is rolling in her grave.