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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Any old growth forest is majestic, but I’m always impressed by the hardy little trees you find in unforgiving environments like seashores, deserts, or arctic and alpine tree lines. The little runts who are trying their best to become a forest: those are the fabulous ones for me.
Ahh yes! I love it when I spot a tree just growing out of a crack in a cliff or similar.
There are two books by Andre Norton, “Judgment on Janus” and ” Victory on Janus” that feature forests and the forest adapted people. Think , SF version of elves.
Alan Dean Foster’s Midworld was a very memorable one for me. Humans live with symbiotic sloth-bear sort of beings, in thr middle canopy of a vast jungle, where the upper canopy is hunted by giant flyers and the ground is full of megafauna. More humans come from space, looking for something to exploit for profit. This goes poorly for them.
Yes, Midworld is the rainforest jungle cranked up right through 11 to around 15. The sole ground visible in the forest is the very peaks of mountains, and literally everything is in a constant struggle for survival.
What an amazing article!
Because I live in Cyprus I would say that the Artemis and Atalante nature trails in Troodos mountains are my favorite places to be. Taking long walks through dense forests mostly consisting of pine trees some of which are real giants is really something that brings me joy. Other trees that you can spot in the mountains here are cedars, cypress and yes even some sequoias
I just looked up some pictures of those trails and that landscape is beautiful! What a lovely place to walk!
For most memorable forest works, I would point to Hothouse by Brian Aldiss (also published as The Long Afternoon of Earth), which is a far-future story of a tidally locked Earth that has its ecology expressed as a single, ginormous banyan tree, among whose branches live the last humans.
Or I would mention “On Sequoia Time” by Daniel Keys Moran, a ‘grey goo’ apocalypse story where the final survivors are a grove of giant sequoia that are the last ‘earthlings’ to resist reduction by the nanobots.
A forest is at the beginning of my questions about capitalism, I think.
When I was eight or nine, I was invited to a classmate’s house that was, at that time, the last one at the edge of the woods. This was a patch of true old growth forest, unfortunately unprotected. And just a few hundred yards from her house there was a stack of massive Sitka spruce, broader at the base than I was then tall–felled, tagged, and left to rot. There were mushrooms all over them.
Why were they there? I asked the grown-ups.
Because somebody felled them but couldn’t sell them for reasons, they said.
But why were they just left? I asked. That was so much firewood just rotting in the woods. Even if he couldn’t sell it as firewood, couldn’t he have given it away? Or invited other people to come cut up the downed trees?
Because, they said, that’s not the way it works.
It’s all subdivision now. Even the mushrooms could not in the end benefit.
I still think about it.
Forestry helps me think about ‘market-based’ approaches to environmental issues, too. One pertinent fact is a hardwood forest adds around 2-3% of wood that is usable as lumber per year. So, if you own a forest and can get more than 3% as a return on investment, your ‘smart’ strategy is to reduce the entire forest to lumber, sell it, and invest in the external (>3%) investment.
Growing up in a place where parallel parking was a precision skill, streetlights were ubiquitous, and learning the subway system was for preteens’ travel, I have always been entranced by the idea of large trees and forests but have little personal experience.
The forest moon of Endor was a beautiful place and I too longed to visit the Ewoks’ tree village and to hopefully get to hug one other than the stuffed Ewok which was a prized gift that I slept with for years.
A grand tree in fiction that I recommend exploring is in the board game Everdell which includes as part of the game setup a graceful large tree. It is a long game and the first time you play it may feel overwhelming. But on replays it feels very immersive and cozy. The artwork on the cards and the board is whimsical, beautiful, and feels creates a fantasy world of sentient woodland animals who build a quaint little town.
Of course, if you do enter those great woods, you may not be entirely welcome… Fangorn had its huorns and there was a Jim Grimsley story (I don’t think it was The Last Green Tree, I recall it as a short story/novella) that featured a woman searching for a brother who had been sold to a group of abusive sentient trees as a servant/symbiont.
Of course! I don’t mind a little menace in my woods. I don’t need wild and ancient places to be safe.
There are many fabulous fantasy forests, but the one that immediately came to mind is the world of Green-sky, from Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Green Sky Trilogy for younger readers (Below the Root, And All Between, and Until the Celebration), featuring a people who live in homes built atop giant trees. The setting first made its appearance in Snyder’s earlier novel, The Changeling (also a favorite read of mine as a teenager), in the form of an imaginary world created by the two girls who are the main characters, before Snyder spun it off as a secondary world of its own.
In terms of real-world forests, my wife and I live within driving distance of Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, which is particularly noted for its striking autumn colors; a couple of years ago, we had the opportunity to visit Great Smoky Mountains National Park as well. I have never been to the West Coast, but I have wanted for many years to see the redwoods and sequoias, and especially the forests of the Pacific Northwest (e.g., Olympic National Park); a friend in Seattle has invited us to come for a visit, so I may have that opportunity.
Now I am making plans to read both The Ancient One and The Secrets of Underhill…
Oh, thank you for that rec! I don’t know how I’ve never read those. Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Egypt Game was one of my favorite books in the entire world growing up, but somehow I never branched out (er… pun intended) into reading her other works. The Green Sky trilogy looks like something I would love.
As someone who didn’t get out west until my late-30s….please make the time to go see the sequoias, redwoods, and other amazing trees out West. I have lived in Ohio my entire life and love our forests here in the east, but it just isn’t the same.
Thank you for your recommendation about the sequoias; I am in my early 50s, and I have spent time in the East and the Midwest (I grew up in Ohio as well, although I was born in South Dakota and now live in Virginia), and I have visited the Rockies (twice) and the desert Southwest (once), but I have yet to visit the West Coast or the Pacific Northwest. I don’t know when I will do so, but I definitely want to visit the sequoias and redwoods when I have a chance.
Thank you for this article – it resonated well with me. (Although I still think the insect-to-human ratio in many forests is subpar.)
First time I have seen anyone similarly impacted by (or even mention) The Ancient One, which is the best of Barron’s books, IMHO.
Sequoias are … amazing. You have to see them in person to understand them.
There are two types of pictures of sequoias. One shows … a tree. It looks like a tree. Only you gradually come to realize that the few colored pixels near the bottom of the trunk are really an SUV.
The other type show a person next to a giant wall of bark, and you don’t see the rest of the tree.
In neither case do you really get the sense of _scale_ that they have.
And now I’m wondering what an ent-Sequoia would look like…
I am lining up a multi-day walk through the birch and pine forests in the Cairngorms National Park here in Scotland. I do love an old mother Scots pine, of which there are many in one of my favourite forests in the Abernethy National Nature Reserve.
Sadly, there are now only about 80,000 sequioas remaining in California, a number tragically on the way down.
There are an estimated half a million apparently planted around Britain. I found some in a public park not far from where I live, but the largest (as yet a juvenile 160 years old at a spindly 55 metres) are apparently in the Benmore Botanic Garden near the west coast of Scotland, where the cool, wet climate (largely protected from wildfires!) seems to suit them. I plan to visit in the summer, although not just for them.
Planted in the 19th century many are already bigger than most native species and, the climate disaster permitting, are expected to dominate the landscape over the next century. Each one is estimated to be locking up around 85kg of carbon annually, so I can’t complain too loudly.
Thank you about the information about the sequoias in Britain; I had no idea that any had been planted there! (One more reason to pay a visit…)
My family and I randomly spotted a sequoia on the grounds of the Macallan distillery when we were doing touristy things around Scotland a couple years ago. There really are sequoias planted everywhere in the UK! They love that climate.
Two SFF forests stand out to me, JRRT’s Mallorns of Lothlorien and a continent wide, possibly sentient forest in Norman Spinrad’s “Child of Fortune”, it’s periphery exploited for medical & recreational pharmaceuticals and deep in it’s interior, the descendants of stoners serve the trees as pollinators.
The Dark Between the Trees by Fiona Barnett had a memorable and mysterious forest in it
Dan Simmons Hyperion Cantos includes a religion that worships giant trees, a spaceship named Yggdrasil, and is one of my true classics of SF.
Living in the Pacific NW I’ve had the privilege of visiting and hiking the majestic old growth spruce forests in the Olympics, the Sequoias in Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Redwoods, and Yosemite NPs, and many Douglas Fir forests here in Oregon. The forests are a spiritual experience and one I could not thrive without. Portland Oregon also has the amazing Forest Park, which includes the arboretum the author mentioned, and many weekends include hikes there as I work out my own scifi plots.
I meant to include the Hyperion spaceship/treeship in my list! Another favorite.
I was here to comment that culture and Yggdrasil. That arc was one of my favourites in the series.
I’ve always been partial to Patricia McKillip’s forests (between the crystal domed library & a powerful solitary woman living on a tree covered mountain, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld was very influential). Beyond that (& the Raksura forests!), the forest (& other vegetation) play an interesting role in Andrea K. Höst’s Darest duology and Priest’s 太岁 [Tài Suì]. However some of the most beautiful giant (some speaking) trees I’ve encountered are in the latter half of Michelle West’s House War books (beginning in vol.4 Skirmish & expanding prolifically onward).
Locally, there’s the waterfalls & forest combination of Moulton Falls Park (no, this is not a misspelling of Multnomah Falls). Day trip close to Portland, a tree lined drive with multiple waterfalls (including swim spots) along the Lewis river, walks & hikes of various levels, and pet (& horse) friendly. Great for summer because it’s an all ages experience, even if some want to explore further, there’s great viewing & rest spots for those who can not.
I’m minded of Ursula LeGuin’s, “The Word for World is Forest”.
The tree doesn’t even need to look alive. Our family had an honored peach tree which produced bigly for decades (had to prop the branches some seasons). So when it died, it remained as a skeleton in the back yard, surrounded by flowers (Dad’s violets had a vicious ground game against the feral roses). For all I know, it’s still there.
If memory serves, one of the stories in Alan Dean Foster’s “With Friends Like These” had musical “Chee Chimer” trees. The Ents woulda’ loved them.
Ursula Le Guin: Vaster then empires and more slow
Memorabele books are :
– Sheri Tepper: Grass, where occurs a complete city above in the trees
– by Jack Vance :
Son of the Tree (where they worship the “Tree of Life”, a huge tree with a trunk five miles in diameter and twelve miles high, and yearn to join with it), The Houses of Iszm (where trees are the center of a society, similar to Kyril), Maske: Thaery (where “Druids” tend trees with extreme devotion) and The Gray Prince (where a race of natives worship trees, which they climb to die)
I studied marine biology in Florida, and I was always fascinated by the mangrove forests there. Mangroves are among some of the most unique livings things we have on our planet, and they do a lot! They’re the only trees that can grow in saltwater, they provide food/shelter for countless animals, and they even serve as barriers against ocean storms. Snorkeling through a mangrove forest is truly an awe-inspiring experience.
The comments thus far provide quite a list of forest-related books and setting to check out.
One more example that comes to mind is the Wookiee homeworld of Kashyyyk in the Star Wars universe. My main acquaintance with Kashyyyk comes from the novel Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn, which portrays the Wookiees as building their cities atop and within kilometers-high trees, above a forest floor too dangerous for even the Wookiees to remain for long. (The glimpse of Kashyyyk in the film Revenge of the Sith, which I saw later, was paltry by comparison.)