My college humanities professor was, quite literally, a tree hugger. This was during my time at the post-secondary pre-university institution known as CEGEP in Quebec. He brought us outside during one of our classes and had us stand around a smallish, ordinary-looking tree. One by one, we were instructed to hug the tree. Perhaps you can imagine a couple dozen 18-year-olds exchanging confused looks, not quite able to believe this was part of a real post-secondary education. I remember it being awkward and not much else.
Don’t get me wrong; I liked trees. As a teenager, I’d taken a trip to the West Coast and been fascinated by the immense trees in Stanley Park, Vancouver, as well as the giant sequoias in California. One feels small and young and inconsequential standing in front of a living thing the size of a high-rise building, an organism that has been alive and growing since David slew Goliath. But as much as I liked trees, I didn’t spend much time thinking about them, let alone hugging them.
My mind was cast back to this, my first and only instance of tree hugging, as I recently finished two fascinating books about trees. It seems I’ve ended up being more like that humanities professor than I ever expected. I’m not quite ready to start hugging trees again, but I do love them and wonder at them like never before. And if we pay close attention, we’ll see that trees play a quiet but remarkably important role throughout the narrative of Scripture.
Trees: Quiet, secret, miraculous
The first book I read was Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, wherein I learned that trees are capable of far more than I ever thought. They can and do communicate with one another in a number of astonishing ways. Take the acacia tree, which can somehow detect that a giraffe is eating its leaves, and then, in a kind of forestry neighbourhood watch, releases a chemical to alert nearby trees of the danger. The neighbouring trees, detecting this signal, release toxins to make their own leaves taste bad. And giraffes, having learned this, know that after eating one acacia tree’s leaves, they must skip the nearby trees and move on to a new spot where the distress signal has not reached.
Or consider how trees use underground fungal networks. These complex networks of tiny subterranean filaments connect the roots of different trees, allowing them to share nutrients with one another. Scientists came up with the clever moniker wood wide web to describe this symbiotic relationship that exists between trees—even trees of different species—and the mycorrhizal fungi that connect them. Through this invisible mechanism, sick or struggling trees can be revived and dying trees can share their last few ounces of nutrients as a parting gift to the forest.
In contrast to these sociable trees, trees planted alone or in small clusters in cities do not communicate with each other. Having been planted and raised outside of their native forest communities, they are eerily silent. Perhaps this is one reason why a walk through a city park, as lovely as that is, feels so different from walking through an old forest.
In order to understand trees a little better, we must bend our sense of time, or rather, slow it down. Tolkien’s character Treebeard from The Lord of the Rings is a good guide here when he says, “You must understand, young Hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish. And we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say.” Add to this his motto, “don’t be hasty,” and we are well on our way to understanding the kind of timescale trees operate with. In old-growth forests, the centuries-old mother trees slow down the growth of their offspring because of their large sun-blocking crowns. Growing in such damp darkness, younger trees can look like adolescent saplings and still be eighty or a hundred years old. And it turns out this slower pace of growth is just the thing for giving a tree the best chance of becoming a giant of the forest.
Wohlleben’s book is a chatty mix between a forester’s memoir and a popularization of the academic literature on trees. It’s genuinely enjoyable and informative—if you have any liking for trees, that is. But the second book I read was a specifically Christian treatment of trees and their place in the story of Scripture, Reforesting Faith by Matthew Sleeth. If Wohlleben’s book reveals the hidden life of trees in the forest, Sleeth’s book reveals the often-overlooked importance of trees in the Bible and in the Christian faith.
Trees in the Bible
After human beings, trees are the type of living thing referred to the most often in the Bible. We find trees on the first and last pages of the Bible, in the first psalm, and plenty of other places, too (Gen. 1:11; Rev. 22:14, 18; Ps. 1). They are not just background context, either. Throughout the Scriptures, we come across many trees that have special significance: the tree of life in Genesis and Revelation, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the oaks of Mamre, the burning bush, Zacchaeus’s sycamore, and, of course, the tree on which our saviour was crucified (Gal. 3:13).
Reforesting Faith explores the various ways that trees are used as a metaphor for people throughout Scripture. Both trees and humans are made from the dust or dirt of the ground, both are created on the third day (if we consider the six days of creation as two sets of three), and a flourishing tree is used to represent the blessed man (or woman) of God repeatedly (Ps 1:3; 52:8; 92:12). One of my favourite passages is in the 17th chapter of Jeremiah, where the prophet compares the “one who trusts in man” with “the one who trusts in the Lord” (Jer. 17:5, 7). Those who trust in man “will be like a bush in the wastelands,” a barren little tree shaking in the dust and wind. But the one who trusts in the Lord “will be like a tree planted by the water,” whose “leaves are always green” and “never fails to bear fruit” (Jer. 17:8). The language of “fruit” and “fruitful” we find all over the Scriptures is another allusion to trees.
When we rejoice in the beauty of trees, we are joining our creator and our first parents, according to Genesis 2:9: “The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food.” That little phrase, pleasing to the eye, tells us so much. Trees, whatever their other good properties, were made to be beautiful. And beauty, in God’s good design, is enjoyed as a pleasure. We learn, therefore, that there are some shapes that are “pleasing to the eye.” And not the human eye alone, but in some mysterious way, pleasing to God.
To enjoy the beauty of trees and give thanks to God for them should come as naturally to us as almost anything else—we’ve been doing it since the garden. My college humanities professor didn’t know it—he was outspokenly derisive of the Bible as anything other than a human book—but his love for trees was closer to the Bible’s view than my adolescent indifference. When God’s final victory is ushered in and we live with him forever in the new Jerusalem, we’ll still be enjoying trees: “On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations” (Rev. 22:2).
Beyond this kind of appreciation, however, we should also remember that trees are mysterious. They have a slow-moving intelligence and agency that science is still only beginning to understand. And the more science discovers, the more its account of trees sounds like what we read in The Lord of the Rings, or perhaps even in The Chronicles of Narnia. With this in mind, one can’t help but wonder just how metaphorical, and how literal, the description we find in Isaiah 55:12 is: “For you shall go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.”
