Trees

Cambodia

Trees hold great fascination for humanity from their beauty, symbology, and a connectedness to nature. The forest has been the backdrop for poetry, stories, and art since ancient times. Mythologies always mention trees, often linking them symbolically to Creation and the World Tree in one design or another.

Alchemy, or ancient science of mind and matter, also blends trees with life and consciousness. In art, trees have many forms and are easily drawn by children or beginning artists.

Spiritual Connections: Did you ever hug a tree? Did you ever talk to a tree? The most calming place people can think to live is a houses near a stream with many old trees - the sights and sounds of nature surrounding them.

A tree is a perennial woody plant. It is most often defined as a woody plant that has many secondary branches supported clear of the ground on a single main stem or trunk with clear apical dominance. A minimum height specification at maturity is cited by some authors, varying from 3 m to 6 m; some authors set a minimum of 10 cm trunk diameter (30 cm girth). Woody plants that do not meet these definitions by having multiple stems and/or small size are called shrubs. Compared with most other plants, trees are long-lived, some reaching several thousand years old and growing to up to 115 m (379 ft) high.

Trees are an important component of the natural landscape because of their prevention of erosion and the provision of a weather-sheltered ecosystem in and under their foliage. They also play an important role in producing oxygen and reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as well as moderating ground temperatures. They are also elements in landscaping and agriculture, both for their aesthetic appeal and their orchard crops (such as apples). Wood from trees is a building material, as well as a primary energy source in many developing countries. Trees also play a role in many of the world's mythologies.

Poland's Mysterious Crooked Forest   Discovery - June 29, 2011

In a tiny corner of western Poland a forest of about 400 pine trees grow with a 90 degree bend at the base of their trunks - all bent northward. Surrounded by a larger forest of straight growing pine trees this collection of curved trees, or "Crooked Forest," is a mystery. Planted around 1930, the trees managed to grow for seven to 10 years before getting held down, in what is understood to have been human mechanical intervention. Though why exactly the original tree farmers wanted so many crooked trees is unknown.

In metaphysics it is believed that all trees on the planet are connected and can communicate with each other through frequency vibration. As with all things in our reality, trees are created following the same architectural codes, called sacred geometry.

Seeing the forest through the trees   PhysOrg - February 21, 2011
University of Arizona researcher Brian Enquist and his colleagues have discovered the secret of patterns within individual trees that can be used to describe the structure and functioning of the world's forests. Imagine you are walking through a forest. All around you are trees of different species, age, size and height. It looks pretty random, right? Wrong.

Brian Enquist of the department of evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona and his team have discovered a secret in the trees: Hidden among and within the architecture of the branches are fundamental rules that link the size, shape, age and in fact everything about a single tree to all the trees in a forest. This rule or code reoccurs as the tree grows, creating a fractal - a repeating pattern - like a spiral of daughter branches emanating from the mother branch or tree trunk. These rules hold true across species, so the ratios of lengths and radii of a mother branch to daughter branches are the same for almost all trees.

Newfound Fossils Reveal Secrets of World's Oldest Forest National Geographic - April 18, 2007

The world's earliest forest may have been filled with slender trees that were three stories tall and capped with branches that resembled bottlebrushes. That's the picture painted by two newfound fossils that are providing unprecedented insight into the appearance and ecology of the first known forest, according to a new study.

Tree worship (dendrolatry) refers to the tendency of many societies throughout history to worship or otherwise mythologize trees. Trees have played an important role in many of the world's mythologies and religions, and have been given deep and sacred meanings throughout the ages. Human beings, observing the growth and death of trees, the elasticity of their branches, the sensitivity and the annual decay and revival of their foliage, see them as powerful symbols of growth, decay and resurrection. The most ancient cross-cultural symbolic representation of the universe's construction is the world tree.

Yggdrasil - The World Tree

The image of the Tree of Life is also a favorite in many mythologies. Various forms of trees of life also appear in folklore, culture and fiction, often relating to immortality or fertility. These often hold cultural and religious significance to the peoples for whom they appear. For them, it may also strongly be connected with the motif of the world tree.

Other examples of trees featured in mythology are the Banyan and the Peepal trees in Hinduism, and the modern tradition of the Christmas Tree in Germanic mythology, the Tree of Knowledge of Judaism and Christianity, and the Bodhi tree in Buddhism.

In folk religion and folklore, trees are often said to be the homes of tree spirits. Historical Druidism as well as Germanic paganism appear to have involved cultic practice in sacred groves, especially the oak. The term druid itself possibly derives from the Celtic word for oak.

Trees are a necessary attribute of the archetypical locus amoenus in all cultures. Already the Egyptian Book of the Dead mentions sycomores as part of the scenery where the soul of the deceased finds blissful repose.

Thoth and Seshat Wrote a Program in Which we Experience

The evidence for tree-worship is almost unmanageably large, and since comparative studies do not as yet permit a concise and conclusive synopsis of the subject, this article will confine itself to some of the more prominent characteristics.

FORESTS

NATURE SPIRITS