TUESDAY WELL'D: 10/21/25

BRITISH TREES

I love the trees here in London. There is something ancient and human about them. They are sculpted by the mysteries of nature and the heightened reality of those of us who find those mysteries sacred in lives that to many wouldn’t seem to put too much store in the sacred. I hadn’t until I began to see trees anew. I grew up out in the country in Mississippi but I was never much of a nature boy. I moved to Manhattan when I was 19 and have ever since preferred long walks on city sidewalks to hikes in any outdoors that doesn’t have them. So this focus on trees late in life has come as a surprise to me. I like trees any place I find them but since I live most of my life still in cities I find them mostly there. There is just something about a city tree. They’re worldly without having seen the world. Or maybe they have seen it in ways I can’t comprehend because of all that goes into making a tree that is incomprehensible to me.

I have accepted that I will never comprehend as well the sacred moments when I am in the presence of the unseen seen world which the trees anchor. I guess incomprehension is itself the anchor for faith, for all beliefs that really don’t depend on proof. That is how I contribute to their sculpting: I see how it manifests - artfully, narratively, organically. And I see it differently from so many people looking at the same thing. But ever since I was a little queer aborning out in that Mississippi countryside I have always seen life differently and been drawn to the mystical. I don’t like explanations or living in the generally accepted ones. That difference has usually been sexual or philosophical or societal, so this practice has given me a new way to see differently. Elemental. Spiritual. Unexpected. Grand. But it is the kind of grandeur that doesn’t need the architecture of cathedrals to make it so. I want to thank all the gods and goddesses for that. Because I don’t believe in worship. That’s another thing I love about trees. They don’t want to be worshipped; they want to be acknowledged. I acknowledge them.

My love of looking at trees has over time led me to talking with them. I do it when I feel the pull of a tree and do it publicly in earshot of passersby. I don’t care what they think of me, that crazy guy who has stopped to chat up a tree. In some way I am rather barking mad, come to think of it, in my madness for bark. I care less, in fact, what other people think about me than I do about what a tree does. Because I have come to believe they can think. I saw the documentary Fabulous Fungi when I was getting to know trees better. It is about the mycorrhizal network which consists of the roots of every tree combining with mycelium to create an underground system of communication much like the world wide web long before there was such a simile with which to pair it. Sometimes I wish I could sit under the limbs of trees and listen to them expound on what it has been like to share the planet with us lowly humans. I even told one on Monday night on my walk to the Charing Cross tube station after seeing Cabaret - the theatre is located on Northumberland Avenue, a great thoroughfare for gazing at trees - that I wished I could hear him respond to my telling him about my evening because I could see him emotionally doing so. I felt he was feeling something. But I think he and his world are protecting me because if I heard a voice coming back the comfort I find in this aspect of my life would turn to fear. So I walk and talk - mostly silently, don’t worry - and search for empathy as a way to communicate.

Oh. I have referred to the tree I met on Monday as a him. But I am never quite sure of a trees’s gender because each tree is a community that harbors all kinds of beauty and behavior. So maybe they are all genders or finally none of them. I have told friends who don’t share my tree fascination but humor me when I talk about this with them that they are missing out not noticing the personalities of trees and how they are always engaged about something and carrying on with other trees when not communing themselves with what goes on in the sky. The ground is theirs. I do tend to depend on the personality of a tree and the eyes - yes, the eyes - to guess at the gender. Because I do find myself gendering them to understand what I cannot by putting it in human terms.

1.

This is the tree that anchors the garden in front of the house where I stay when I am in London. The whole garden is what I call full. The woman who tends it, not my landlady Suzanne Noble, is a conjurer of some sort. I did ask Suzanne about this tree and she said it is a peach one that is always in the process of dying. I told her I thought it was actually the opposite. It always seems to me to be in the ugly process of living. But I find this tree’s gnarly stooped presence beautiful. There is something quite moving about her, especially when you view her up close and see what all is going on to keep her coursing with life, oozing it.

2.

When I visit Bath, I always make a pilgrimage to this tree at Abbey Green.

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