![]() ![]() He hunts, fishes, fights forest fires, takes lovers, marries, forges friendships with the earthbound-all in all a rich life removed from the obsessions with stature and obedience that troubled his childhood. He proposes “An Ideal State in the Trees.” He wins the respect of the great philosophers and scientists of Europe. He simply prefers the vantage over human life that he gains from the tree tops. The trees lift him across property and class lines. He invents life anew, distancing himself from the grudge he holds against his family and society. He climbs from oak to elm to carob to mulberry to lemon to olive, passes gracefully branch to branch. ![]() He lives and dies in the trees, never again touching down on solid ground. The boy leaves the table, leaves home, and climbs the knobby old holm oak that stands in the park outside the window. At age twelve this heir to the ancient Dukedom of Ombrosa resists his father’s insistence that he eat a plateful of snails. Italo Calvino’s Oak in The Baron of the TreesĬosimo Piovasco de Rondó is the protagonist of The Baron in the Trees. Eighteen is insufficient to cover a subject as rich as “trees in literature”-but no number would ever be enough.ġ. Better to let each one stand on its own, “as diverse in scope as trees are in leaf,” as Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in her introduction to Old Growth. Would Whitman’s hickory defeat Yeats’s chestnut? In the battle of the oaks, who would reign supreme: Calvino or Kunitz? But the trees invoked here, and the works of literature in which they are found, resist such a reductive treatment. Others thrum with life: the Ailanthus altissima in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and the banyan in Wu Ming-yi’s The Stolen Bicycle, a monster that could hold a whole company of soldiers in its branches and roots and still keep growing.Īt first we wanted to rank the trees, or pit them head-to-head, March Madness–style, to see which one came out on top. The results were eye-opening: as expected, Robert Frost made several appearances, but could anyone have guessed that two different marriages would spring from a dramatic reading of “Birches”? Some of the trees invoke the solemness of death: the mysterious conifer in Yusef’s Komunyakaa’s “Tree Ghost” and the potted orange tree in Valeria Luiselli’s Faces in the Crowd, the leaves on its bare branches replaced with post-it notes. To celebrate its publication, we asked our contributors and several of Orion’s editors to name their favorite tree from a book or poem. Recently, the editors of Orion selected the best works about trees from our archive for a new anthology, Old Growth. Trees are bigger than us and they usually outlive us-no wonder they loom large in our imagination. The Tree of Jiva and Atman in Vedic scripture, the Tree of Life in the Hebrew Bible, the withered poplars of the I Ching. They were there at the beginning, trees in literature, centuries before humans had the idea of putting literature on (the pulped, bleached, and pressed remains of) trees. ![]()
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