The Characters of trees

Driving through the bare deciduous woodland forest yesterday got me thinking about the nature of trees and the roles they play in our stories.

If we want the planets we design to be suitable for humans to live on they have to have some mechanism for keeping the atmosphere as we need it.  On Earth trees fill this role magnificently, taking in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen. We wouldn't have an atmosphere we could breathe if it wasn't for the trees and other plants that maintain it.

Thinking about convergent evolution, any planet that has a suitable atmosphere for us is likely to have some form of trees.  But rather than seeing these familiar parts of the landscape as limiting our world design, we can embrace them as characters.

Tolkien famously did this in The Lord of the Rings with Treebeard the Ent, who takes the tree as character to its extreme as he can walk about and talk.  I did something rather different in my short story The Scent of Other Lives (one of the stories in my ebook collection Otherlives).  There the trees have branches they can move like limbs, and they communicate in some kind of telepathic way.

We can use them as characters who are conspicuous by their absence, as in Sarah Crossan's Breathe.  Her story is a cautionary ecological tale about what happens when we cut all the trees down.  There the few that exist are  hidden from view and tended in ways full of ritual.  

Avatar invented a new take on the idea of trees being the witnesses to our history.  The Tree of Souls was the keeper of the Na'vi's memories, the centre of their spirituality and history.  

In my book Panthera : Death Song the trees of the rainforest become characters.  Their denseness prevents my humans from doing things, and they provide home and sustenance for the jagothera big cats.  I've tried to capture the magic of the tropical sun rising and setting through the canopy, the dark foliage silhouetting a crimson and golden sky.

As well as being the essential lungs of an ecosystem, trees can be home.  Think of the massive Hometree in Avatar, a tree so huge it was a living cathedral.  Tall trees reaching into the sky give a planet a sense of continuity.  These guardians of the atmosphere have been here for many human generations, and will last for many more to come - if we don't cut them down.