You’ve seen this image countless times: a professor, leaning against the trunk of a tree, gesturing, the focal point of a circle of students sitting on the grass, cross-legged, thumbing their paperback books.
I’ve been that professor more than a few times. Students often ask for classes outdoors on warm days in the spring after the long Midwestern winter. I’ve learned not to wear light-colored clothing in April because my pants will be grass-stained and my shirt marked by bark.
Outdoor classes tend to go well: We lose all of the technology and some of the lesson plan, but the conversation is more relaxed and freewheeling. Thoughts can extend in directions that the walls of a classroom seem to constrain. Sometimes there are long pauses, and we become aware of the rustling leaves and the play of light and shade. I suspect that I am not alone in the feeling that we are part of something old and sacred, that we are seated under the Scholar’s Tree at the center of the world. Part of me wants to break the silence with a profound question; another part believes it is better to wait and listen, to let the students speak first, prompted by the tree itself: an enormous oak.
This happened recently in a class on American environmental writing, so the students were used to such discussions. One student finally took a chance: “An old tree reminds us that we have a common past; other students have sat here, and the tree may still be here, alive, for generations after we’re gone. It’s a living link with the past.” Everyone nodded.
“Trees may be reminders of death,” another student said, “or encouragements to ‘seize the day,’ but they also renew themselves every spring. They tell us that we can be reborn and that there is hope for life after death.”
One of the double-majors in English and biology observed, “We probably like trees because we’re primates that evolved in and around them: We used them as a source of food and protection from predators.” She continued, “We didn’t know it back then, but it seems miraculous that trees and people breathe each other’s waste gases—it’s such perfect complementarity.”
“There is something ancient and seemingly sentient about old, big trees,” said another student. “It’s not surprising that some cultures have worshiped them.”
One of the quiet students in the class suddenly remembered a slice of redwood that she had seen in a museum. Its inner growth rings were from the early Middle Ages. “What if trees like that could think and talk? What could we learn from them? They would have a radically different vision of history.” Another student joked, “You mean like Treebeard in The Lord of the Rings? ‘Don’t be hasty!’” “Yes,” the quiet student said, and everyone smiled.
Opening my copy of Walden, I recalled that Thoreau considered trees his companions. In the chapter “Spring,” he reflected on the similarities of plants and people: “Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins?” The fundamental structure of living things consists of circulation and branching in pursuit of nourishment: “The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf,” Thoreau said. “Who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven?”
As I read that line, most of the students looked up into the backlit leaves of the tree.
One of them said, “So you climb the tree and find wisdom at the top?”
“You all know about Siddhartha Gautama and the Bodhi tree, right?,” I asked, and the tradition was recounted by a student who had taken a class on Buddhism. She even remembered the Four Noble Truths.
I suspect that most American colleges have at least a few special trees that students and alumni know as well as this one. You’ll often find students reading in their shade or sitting in their branches. Some trees will bear carvings that may go back more than a hundred years. We feel sad when such trees are lost, as their fate and the people associated with them are connected.
It’s one thing when a tree is lost to age, disease, or a storm, but cutting down an old, familiar tree seems like a kind of murder, not just of the tree but of human memory.
“The beautiful large trees that stood so long on Dr. Hunt’s old place ... were cut down the other day, to gain a few inches more room,” wrote Walt Whitman when he was a young journalist. “It is perhaps expecting too much of those who new-come or new-buy in Brooklyn, that they should look upon such things with the regard of love and sorrow. They never played under them in childhood. They don’t remember them. ... What is done cannot be undone. ... In the name of both the past and the future, we protest against it!”
Perhaps a collective sense of anxiety about the natural world—a growing preservationist impulse in the face of anticipated loss—has prompted an efflorescence of books about trees from an aesthetic and cultural standpoint in the last decade or so.
Thomas Pakenham’s Meetings With Remarkable Trees (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1996), for example, showcases British giants and trees with historical and literary associations, such as Sidney’s oak, a 500-year-old ruin that still clings to life. Pakenham’s next book, Remarkable Trees of the World (Norton, 2002) takes a more global perspective. One poignant image shows the Nolan Creek red cedar, in Washington State—it stands 178 feet tall, far above the surrounding forest, which was clear-cut several decades ago. A preservationist sensibility informs Pakenham’s other books, too: The Remarkable Baobab (Norton, 2004) and In Search of Remarkable Trees: On Safari in Southern Africa (Jonathan Ball, 2007).
His work seems to have inspired many other notable works, such as Mythic Woods, by Jonathan Roberts (WN, 2005); America’s Famous and Historic Trees, by Jeffrey G. Meyer with Sharon Linnéa (Houghton Mifflin, 2001); Trees: National Champions, by Barbara Bosworth (MIT Press, 2005); Remarkable Trees of Virginia, by Nancy R. Hugo and Jeff Kirwan, photography by Robert Llewellyn (University of Virginia Press, 2008); and Bark: An Intimate Look at the World’s Trees, by Cedric Pollet (Frances Lincoln, 2010).
There are also several recent books that examine trees from the standpoint of cultural studies. The best one I’ve read is Republic of Shade: New England and the American Elm, by Thomas J. Campanella (Yale University Press, 2003). He shows how elms marked the spread of New England culture across the United States: They literally spread out from Harvard Yard like the idealism of the Transcendentalists. By my lifetime, nearly all of about 77 million of those trees had been felled by Dutch elm disease. And Lives of the Trees: An Uncommon History, by Diana Wells (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2010), presents the origins of their names, cultural associations, and practical uses—topics you won’t find in a typical field guide.
Trees are a symbolic component of college life for reasons that my students understood with prompting. The growing number of books about trees suggests a larger cultural movement to recognize their importance, preserve them, and memorialize their departure. It’s fortunate that so many of our campuses have become homes to some of the oldest and best-maintained trees in the world. They not only make our lives more pleasant; they prompt reflections that cultivate the best impulses of academic life.
