To plant a tree is to affirm one’s faith in the future, while at the same time reckoning with the sadness inherent in the comparative brevit
Excerpt from this story from The Revelator, by Tim Weed, author:
Five years ago, my partner and I bought a house surrounded by open fields. Since then, as a kind of small-scale reforestation project designed to bring the forest closer, we’ve planted several dozen new trees, all native species, with a bias toward the slightly more southern and drought-tolerant varieties likely to do well in the face of rising temperatures.
It’s an enduring pleasure to watch these new beings develop their root systems, gain strength, and begin to take on height and girth. Like characters in a slowly unfolding narrative, each is beginning to take on a distinct personality. Some are robust, growing fast and proud; others are slower, patiently marshalling their resources and biding their time. A few have even begun to take on a certain stateliness, precursor to the mantle of grace and dignity they will inherit as they age.
To plant a tree is to affirm one’s faith in the future, while at the same time reckoning with the sadness inherent in the comparative brevity of a human lifespan. It is to humbly acknowledge one’s place in the cycles of natural life across the unimaginable vastness of geologic time.
As a novelist and avid reader, I’ve long been interested in literary portrayals of trees. Somewhere around my eighth birthday my parents started reading The Hobbit and all three books of The Lord of the Rings to my siblings and me, a journey that took us the better part of a year.
Tolkien demonstrated once and for all that that along with other remarkable aspects of human life — love, heroism, death, the mysteries of the soul — our ancient association with trees is a worthy subject for literature.
Trees figure prominently in more recent novels, of course, perhaps most famously in Richard Powers’ 2018 masterpiece, The Overstory, whose presiding consciousness is actually a tree, or trees writ large.
Powers’ uniquely positioned high-omniscient narrator gives him the freedom to range backwards and forwards across great expanses of time. Three decades can go by in a single paragraph; a long-ago moment can be experienced with vivid intimacy, and we often know the fate of a character well before it comes to pass.
Trees play a key role in my new novel, The Afterlife Project, set partly in an old-growth forest of the deep future, in which trees provide nourishment, solace, and even life-giving companionship for a marooned scientist. One of the great pleasures of writing the book came from the hundreds of hours I spent in my local forest, giving my imagination free rein to dream up a fictional forest of the future.
