I have always suspected, deep down inside, that trees are meant to be extremely large.
I spent my childhood hiking and camping in Colorado, which is home to a number of perfectly respectable trees. But those that are admirable enough to make Wikipedia’s list of superlative trees (an excellent page to peruse if you want to journey down a Wikipedia rabbit hole of unknown depths) are Rocky Mountain bristlecone pines (Pinus aristate), which means they are very old, very gnarled, and very beautiful in a rugged, windswept way, but not particularly large.
On the other hand, I also grew up surrounded by aspens (Populus tremuloides). They did not seem at all remarkable or noteworthy to me at the time; the Front Range of Colorado and the Rocky Mountains are covered with aspens. The white bark marked with black splotches, the two-tone leaves that ripple delightfully in the breeze, the cheery gold that comes and goes so quickly in the Mountain West’s fleeting autumn—they’re beautiful but seemed to me, a child, so very ordinary. We had several in our suburban yard, and the trees you have in your yard always seem ordinary. Several more would appear each year, bold little saplings poking up through the lawn in random places. Some we let grow, some we clipped down. They love sunlight, which Colorado has in abundance, and they grow very fast. We can track their growth through our family photos.
What I didn’t really grasp at the time that aspens are, in fact, truly remarkable trees. I have a clear childhood memory of my father explaining to me that the new saplings came from the roots of the larger trees, which spread under the ground before reaching up to grow. They don’t exist only as individuals, but as interconnected clusters of clones, where groves of any size from a few trees to tens of thousands are a singular genetic individual with a shared root system.
The oldest and largest aspen clone we know about is called Pando, located in Utah’s Fishlake National Forest. It’s a single organism that spreads over 100 acres and contains some 40,000 trees. The oldest individual trees are only about a century old, so it’s difficult to measure the age of the clone as a whole. It’s a topic of ongoing scientific debate, with active research from tree geneticists and glaciologists and paleoecologists and paleobotanists offering a wide range of possible ages. The only thing scientists can really agree on is that it is very old and wasn’t growing underneath the last Pleistocene ice sheets—which doesn’t really narrow it down much.
As a kid I accepted the weirdness of aspens without thinking much about it, because when you’re young you don’t always notice when things are astonishing, or when you have a scientific marvel rustling in the breeze right outside your bedroom window. I was more obsessed with trees that weren’t right outside my bedroom window.
Even in my imagination, I had certain requirements. Yggdrasil and other mythological world trees weren’t interesting to me; it felt wrong for there to be a singular tree when there could be an entire forest. I wanted the trees to be bigger, the forests to be bigger, and most of all I wanted them to be where I could see them. Climb them. Live in them.
Okay, I’ll admit it: I wanted to be an Ewok.
I… still want to be an Ewok. We all have impossible dreams. I wanted to live on the forest moon of Endor. Just the fact that they called it a “forest moon” made it sound like the coolest place ever, and way more pleasant than swampy Dagobah, which surely had a lot of very large insects. I was far too young to have heard of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest or any of the other classic sci fi that incorporate forest ecology into its storytelling, so my childhood dream of living in large trees was all about the Ewoks.
The parts of The Return of the Jedi (1983) that take place amidst the trees of Endor were filmed in the forests of Humboldt and Del Norte Counties in northern California. Those forests are home to the towering coastal redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens), which are the tallest trees on Earth. The tallest of them is Hyperion, at over 380 ft (116 m), and there are several more in its general vicinity that nearly as tall.
Because we are able to walk 380 feet relatively quickly, and because we tend to conceptualize vertical height in terms of tall buildings, it can be hard to imagine just how tall that is. And if you’ve never stood at the base of a particularly tall coastal redwood, or walked along a trail that winds around their trunks, it’s hard to explain what it feels like. Even before I ever had a chance to see redwoods in person, I was captivated by that feeling. Not just the feeling of being a small mammal in a large forest, but of conveying that feeling in words, of communicating that sense of both smallness and wonder.
I blame my enduring fascinating with large trees on children’s author T.A. Barron and his novel The Ancient One. The book came out in 1992, and it was exceptionally timely; in the early ’90s, news in the Western U.S. was filled with stories about the contentious legal battle between logging companies, the U.S. Forest Service, and conservationists over the habitat of the spotted owl (Strix occidentalis). I read The Ancient One in fifth or sixth grade. Exactly the right age for one beautiful, vivid book to embed itself in my memory and never let go.
The Ancient One tells the story of a girl name Kate who goes to visit her aunt in rural Oregon and finds herself in the middle of a clash between loggers and environmentalists. The cause of their discord is a recently-discovered stand of ancient redwood trees in the remote Lost Crater; the struggling loggers want the area opened for harvesting, while conservationists and the local indigenous tribe want to protect the unique area.
Kate and her aunt are on the side of the conservationists. While trying to save the grove, Kate finds herself transported backward in time several hundred years, where she lands in the middle of another battle to protect the grove from an evil force that wants to destroy it.
As a child, I was desperately jealous of Kate and her adventures. I wanted to go into a deep, dark ancient forest and discover strange and wonderful things. Even more than that, I wanted the journey to matter. I didn’t want to live a portal fantasy where I went away and came back to world unchanged. What I loved so much about Kate’s story was that the natural and fantastical existed in the same place, in the same world, if only you knew where to look.
The Ancient One’s blend of science and magic, activism and adventure has stuck with me for decades. The book provided that vital type of early inspiration that hums along in the background of my mind, quietly impacting every story I write. I kept thinking about it as I was writing my latest book. In The Secrets of the Underhill (Quirk), eleven-year-old Nick and her mother spend their lives studying and carrying for groves of magical trees. When the trees start getting sick, they set out to find out the reason, which takes them to a city at the center of a vast, ancient grove that relies on the trees for its industry, commerce, and culture.
As I was developing the story, it was important to me to emphasize all the threads of connection in the natural world—especially those that tie humans and human societies into the ecosystems around us. We aren’t separate from our world. We may feel that connection most keenly when we are directly interacting with nature, wandering in a forest or sitting beside the ocean or climbing a mountain, but it doesn’t end when we aren’t paying attention to it. That’s a feeling that I remember understanding so vividly when I was reading The Ancient One as a child, and it’s a feeling that I try to capture in my own writing for children.
I would be well into adulthood before I had the chance to see the forests of Oregon myself—now I’m surrounded by them all day, every day—but it didn’t take quite that long for me to meet some other very large trees.
Around the end of my high school years, my family began visiting Yosemite National Park and other parts of the Sierra Nevada. That’s where I became acquainted with my favorite trees in the entire world: giant sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum). Yes, they are a different genus from coastal redwoods. Yes, coastal redwoods are in the genus Sequoia but giant sequoias are not. Taxonomy is fun!
Giant sequoias only grow naturally on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. They are pretty rare and constantly threatened by changing climate and habitat loss. But gardeners around the world love them so they have been cultivated in a number of surprising places; there are a few not far from where I live now, in Portland’s Hoyt Arboretum, so I can go say hello and tell them I love them anytime I want.
Sequoia bark is naturally quite fire-resistant, which leads to it being eerily possible for a lightning-struck giant sequoia to be charred and hollow on the inside but still alive and growing on the outside. They have tiny pinecones—about the size of a large walnut—and retain their youthful form until they are a couple hundred years old. After that, they start to take on their distinctive shape. You can always spot a sequoia when you’re looking out over a forest in the Sierras. Most conifers, including young sequoias, have the cone shape we associate with pines, but mature sequoias have rounded tops with massive branches.
And they just keep growing.
And growing.
And growing.
This is, I fervently believe, exactly what trees should do. This is why I love the giant sequoias—and the aspen clones, for that matter, as well as bristlecone pines, junipers, cedars, cypresses, and yews, all the different tree species around the world with individuals that have been alive for a thousand years or more. Centuries come and go, and they keep growing. Empires rise and fall, but trees don’t care. Millennia pass, and they keep growing.
I have been to Sequoia National Park several times, but only in the middle of winter. I have no data from other seasons to prove that winter is the superior season for visiting the giant sequoias. But it is. There is no experience in the world like snowshoeing through the snow-hushed Giant Forest on a cold winter day, crunching across meadows and weaving around trees that have been growing for hundreds or thousands of years. It’s both humbling and exhilarating. It makes you feel very small and very connected.
There is a word for that feeling: awe. But awe, it turns out, is not the easiest feeling to define. It’s only fairly recently that cognitive and social scientists have started to really dig into what awe is, and why we feel it in some situations and not others. Although the feeling is by no means limited to experiences in the natural world, the link between awe and nature is impossible to ignore; it’s something that people who find comfort and purpose in the outdoors have begun to pay a lot of attention to. Some of that is driven by curiosity, but some of it is driven by frustration and desperation. A lot of people, myself included, often think: How can anybody look at the beautiful world around us and not care if it gets paved over and burnt to a crisp? Why do some people feel that sense of being very small in a very connected world so deeply, and others seem to not feel it at all?
It’s tempting to offer a bunch “well, obviously” answers in response to those questions. Well, obviously, some people are too selfish. (Why?) Well, obviously, some people feel no connection to nature or society. (Why?) Well, obviously, some people are too narcissistic to let themselves feel like a small part of the world. (Why?) Well, obviously, some people feel threatened or challenged where others feel awe. (Why?) Well, obviously, some people will not abide anything that calls into question their sense of place in the world. (Why?) None of those answers are actually answers. They are only more questions.
The awe I feel while snowshoeing through the Giant Forest is very typical—so much so that a 2018 white paper from the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California at Berkeley uses the experience of hiking among the giant sequoias as an example of awe in its very first sentence. Both the smallness and the connectedness are vital to the experience.
I think that’s why I have always been, and probably always will be, drawn to stories that capture that feeling in their fictional forests. I want to feel the great and terrible age of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fangorn Forest in The Lord of the Rings. I want to wander across the uneasy, unsettling borders of Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood. The moment I figure out how to transmigrate into a fictional universe, I am visiting the forest where the mountain trees grow in Martha Wells’ Books of the Raksura—I will show up at Indigo Cloud’s doorstep, and I will unnerve them with my cheerful, wide-eyed enthusiasm even when they threaten to eat me.
It’s also why I keep writing about magical forests. I can’t seem to stop—then again, I’m not trying to stop. I want humans to always be able to experience awe when faced with the strange and marvelous natural world around it. And I write fiction because I want to capture emotions and experiences in a way that transports the reader, so why would I stop writing about something I never grow tired of feeling? I think I’ll just keep making the forests stranger and the trees bigger…
I’m always genuine when I solicit comments, but in this case I am really truly especially genuine: I would love to hear about your favorite forests, both real and fictional. Tell me about the books I should read and the places I should visit so that I might appreciate all magnificent trees as much as they deserve.
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The Secrets of Underhill
