Familiar yet alien, trees inspire awe. What creatures are these that exist so far beyond our human scale, with heights up to 60 times our own, life spans up to 100. And they hold a strange intelligence, talking via a foreign chemical language, alerting each other to dangers, signaling distress, coming to each other’s aid. We grant them mystical powers and spiritual, even religious status. We've lived among them since human time began, yet we struggle to know them.
And they are so individual. Some carry a gravitas, a sense of wisdom; others a quirkiness of character. They take almost any posture: dignity, exuberance, feisty defiance; patience, acceptance, resignation. Persistence, pure stubbornness. (I'm sometimes amazed by a tree's tenacity in clinging to life in ludicrous conditions.) And each tree is unique, as distinct as a snowflake, a fingerprint, as each one of us.
