The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. William Blake
We are drawn to books for many reasons — a respected author, a recommendation from a friend or, occasionally, an arresting cover. I am a frequenter of stationers, bakeries, hardware stores and bookshops. While browsing in one of the latter establishments I was attracted to a book because the four-word title included the words ‘language’ and ‘trees’ — two of my abiding interests. I’m an incurable lover of language and keen to upgrade my somewhat amateur tree identification skills.
So, when I came across a book with these two words on the spine, I plucked it from the bookshop shelf. On closer inspection I noted that Max Porter, author of the excellent Grief is a Thing of Feathers, hails it “a masterpiece”. I am reassured. On viewing the contents I found that the book comprises a wide range of contributions from, amongst others, Robert Macfarlane, Zadie Smith, Jorge Luis Borges and Ursula Le Guin. Now I’m seriously interested.
I’m intrigued by the illustrations — densely packed tiny silhouettes of trees. I twig just what’s going on. Katie Holten has created an original alphabet using the outlines of different trees for letters — the letter A represented by the Apple tree, the letter B by the Beech tree and so on. On opening the book there are two title pages face to face. On the left using her beautiful tree alphabet, on the right in standard English. It is an eclectic collection from a diverse range of contributors — scientists, environmentalists, poets, ecologists and tree lovers from different backgrounds. This is an arboreal anthology articulating the case that language and nature have a deep and symbiotic relationship. Among the 68 contributions are lines from a play by Plato, a song lyric from Radiohead, a true story about the distress of a chainsaw operator instructed to cut down an elm tree he knew to be healthy and an article explaining how the Chinese pictographically merge the names of people with trees.
I’ll attempt to interest Rye News book lovers by highlighting just a few more.
Those who bake their own bread might be interested in Lucy O’Hagen’s Acorn Bread Recipe. Those of us still using fountain pens could experiment with Rachael Hawkwind’s Oak Gall Ink Recipe. Oak Gall, she tells us, was used to write the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It can also be used as a wood stain and as a dye for wool and other natural fibres. There is even a recipe for Sun Tea using fresh evergreen tree tips.
Artist Rachel Sussman’s meditation on time was triggered by the loss by fire of The Senator, a 3,500 year- old tree in Florida. She says that the experience put her mortality into perspective giving her a more immediate understanding of the brevity of a single human life in the face of the incomprehensible vastness of “forever”.
Ada Limón extols the interconnectedness of the natural world as shown by the first four lines of her poem:
Birds for leaves, and leaves for birds.
The tawny yellow mulberry leaves
are always goldfinches tumbling
across the lawn like extreme elation.
I love a glossary. Robert Macfarlane, an insatiable word gatherer, provides a wonderful collection of arboreal words like ‘daddock’ for dead wood and ‘griggles’ for the small apples left on the tree. From the nature writing of the undervalued rural poet, John Clare, Macfarlane harvested the word ‘suthering’ for the noise of wind blowing through trees.
Robin Kimmerer contemplates the loss of her native American Potawatomi language. She speaks of “the pulse of animacy” that she finds in words without any equivalent in English like Kchekansimengamesh, their word for hazel tree. In a lengthy and powerful article, she emphasises how colonisers use language to demean and subdue first nation’s peoples. She advocates the use of vocabulary and grammar to assert the rights of the people against the exploitation of their land and natural resources. In a similar vein Richard Powers speaks of the arrogance of those who see themselves as the rightful possessors of the planet when he says of planet earth that “It’s a world of trees where humans have just arrived”.
We can learn so much from trees. Nicole Davi’s detailed study of tree rings enables us “to understand recent global warming trends in the context of the past 2,000 years or more”. She likens discovering trees in inaccessible places as being “akin to stumbling into a library of ancient scrolls, connecting us to another time, helping us navigate what’s to come.” Plant ecologist Brian Enquist explains rules pertaining to the architecture of trees and cites Leonardo da Vinci’s observation that “all the branches of a tree at every stage of its height, when put together, are equal in thickness to the trunk below them”.
Professor of forest ecology Suzanne Simard also explores the ways trees interact by means of underground mycorrhizal fungal networks. She speaks of ‘hub trees’ that assist the exchange of information between others in woods and forests. Poet Ros Gay echoes her view speaking of ‘fungal ambulances’ that dispatch health care from healthy trees to neighbouring trees under stress.
Trees can be symbols signifying political ideals. Robert Sullivan cites the case of the Liberty Trees that represented a stand against British rule in 1765 when early settlers were protesting the Stamp Act in Massachusetts. There are many examples of trees being used as meeting places bringing people together for a political cause. In England, agricultural labourers met under the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Tree in Dorset in the 1830s in their struggles to form the first trade union to bargain for better pay and conditions.
Tacita Dean pays homage to the acclaimed poet, translator and enthusiastic gardener Michael Hamburger, “a harvester of fruit as well as words”, who railed against the mono-culture of big-business capitalism, this “junk age” and the damage it’s inflicting on “the maimed globe”. Nemo Andy Guiquita campaigns for the protection of the Ecuadorian rainforest against the depredations of mining and oil companies. For her and other Amazonians the forest “for us is home. It is our life, our pharmacy, our everything”.
Katie Holten has added to the long history of mark making that embraces early Bronze Age Cuneiform scripts, the medieval Irish Ogham, often called the Celtic Tree Alphabet, ancient Norse and Germanic runes, Chinese logographs and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Katie’s unique font can be downloaded for free from her website www.katieholten.com/abouttrees
The Language of Trees is a treatise on the many uses and benefits of trees, a call to action in the cause of reversing deforestation and the despoliation of nature and a book to inspire us to rewild our words.
The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Language and Literature by Katie Holten is published by Elliott & Thompson.
Image Credits: SJM , Katie Holten .