The Tree Path
The Tree Path
Trees - all the year round
This is our cultural relationship with nature.
This is our cultural relationship with nature. Trees demonstrate how in every land (apart from the deserts of stone, sand and ice) we have learned to live with nature, using them, explaining things by them, telling stories and moral tales through them.
Our stories now are of decimation of giant sequoias for newspaper pulp, acidification of rivers by exotic conifers, degradation of forest peoples, loss of wisdom about the things that trees can give us.
How can we rebuild our sensibility towards trees as working partners, natural allies and cultural comrades? Planting trees is only part of the answer. We have to care for the existing trees better than we do.
Common Ground has initiated Tree Dressing Day, drawing on many traditions from across the world, with a view to creating a festival in which we can all share. On the first weekend of December, people are getting together to choose a tree in the street, on the green, in the wood with their local authority arboricultural officer. Together they are decorating or illuminating the tree or gathering around to sing, dance, and tell stories. By briefly drawing attention to the trees we have been taking for granted, and gathering together to do it, we may begin to find ways in which the trees in the public domain can become a shared responsibility, never again to be at risk from drought, careless heaping, root cutting, road-salt spray and myriad other man-made actions which mean that trees find it hard to ward off disease.
Trees need our help all year round: take a good look at the trees in your neighbourhood, seek out their stories and set ideas for celebration and care in motion. Traditions have to begin sometime.
[An edited version of this appeared in the National Trust Magazine, Spring 1994].
