had a silly revelation about silverwood trees yesterday.
Their parasitic nature is part of their visual design. Holoparasitic plants, those that can only get fixed carbon from their hosts and therefore require hosts, commonly lack any chlorophyll. This makes colors aside from green much more common in them; as expected, they can't photosynthesize.
Some examples include Monotropa uniflora, the genus Voyria, most family members of Orobanchaceae, and my beloved genus Rafflesia.
The silverwood trees are seen colored within certain illustrations, but they've been most recently shown in episode 4 of the anime. Here, you can see that the plant lacks green leaves which indicates a lack of chlorophyll.
The aesthetic of these trees always was indicating that they're parasites; what makes them magical is what they take from the hosts.
