The Life & Love Of Trees

“Trees are vital – the roots and the shelter for our existence. Without them we simply wouldn’t be here.” From that starting point, Lewis Blackwell explores the miracle of the tree in our lives today.

I write this under a sturdy beam that holds up the ceiling, sitting in a chair with a timber frame. My feet are planted on a floor that is made from tiles, and yet these, too, have required timber in creating forms for their manufacture.

Meanwhile, the computer that records my keystrokes sits on an oak table and was packaged and marketed via a range of wood-derived paper products. The heat in the room is partly fuelled from an open fire of logs, and aided by the ambient sunshine coming through the glass in a wooden window frame. I could list many thousands of other materials indebted to trees – there’s one in your vision right now, these pages.

Visible products are only the half of it, though. Our dependency becomes more vital and mysterious. Patients in hospital are now thought to get well faster if they have a sightline of trees. Families that live with trees nearby are said to have less fierce arguments, or at least resolve them better. These stories are not based on hard science – their veracity requires more substantive study – but the fact that we have such ideas and theories, true or false, indicates the desire we have to connect with trees. The thinking discussed in the scientific community is increasingly that trees may trigger some kind of deep response in our system. It is not a sentimental or aesthetic enjoyment of arboreal scenes that explains our preference for environments with trees. Instead, the speculation infers that our connection with trees goes right back through evolution to when we came out and down from the trees. Unlike the other primates, we stopped living in the branches and moved to the ground and the edge of the forest, where we began to exploit the trees and our fellow creatures. Now we tend to live in cities, with a life hemmed in by asphalt, steel, glass, plastics and digital communications, but we may still intuitively know that trees are a central part of the universal life cycle.

As we look at the beautiful and the strange forms and behaviours of trees in these pages, we need to remember that it is not so much in the second and third dimensions, but in the fourth dimension – time – that trees are most outstanding as a life force…

They are like family, where you can never untie or deny the connection, only seek more information to satisfy the reasoning mind and more love to soothe the heart.

Extract from The Life & Love Of Trees by Lewis Blackwell, published by Quivertree.