“Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather—storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.”
I am no expert on trees, but I am a hopeless romantic. And I am guilty of calling trees ‘witnesses to the history of our times’ and not just ‘trees’. I can’t help but think about all the changes in season they would have survived and all the battles for dominance among various species they would have witnessed. And Anne Michaels could not have put it better when she wrote ‘a forest shares a history which each tree remembers even after it has been felled’. My series titled ‘The many moods of trees’ is a celebration of that.
My love affair with trees started on a cold winter morning at Jim Corbett National Park, home to the magnificent Sal Trees. Sal (Shorea rubusta) is a beautiful tree that often grows up to 35 to 40 m tall and has a distinct shining foliage.
If you stare at a Sal Tree long enough, you might see a tree that has the patience and calmness of a monk (pardon the anthropomorphism). All it wants to do is, take its time and slowly but surely aim for the sky. While doing so, it ensures the survival of other trees, shrubs, climbers, fungi, lichens, mosses and of course birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians.
Sal Trees in Jim Corbett NP, India
In the book, ‘The Hidden Life of Trees’, the author Peter Wohlleben, makes an interesting case for the many sacrifices trees make on their way to personal and social growth. In the forest that he studied, he specifically observed how trees slow down and sacrifice growth today for a better tomorrow - the process that includes shedding leaves, depriving the young of enough light, and slowing down the growth. This slow growth is the key to ensuring that their inner woody cells are tiny and contain almost no air. That makes the trees flexible and resistant to breaking in storms.
Sacrifice at every stage, small or big, is a part of the life of a tree.
A solitary tree, or ones that are part of a forest, have so much to tell us. A tree does not go around the world to find beauty and joy, it lives its entire life and finds solitude in the same place. So if I had to take one lesson from them, it would be that home is where you are. Home is not a dreamlike destination in some other location, where everything will be perfect. It is not a place outside of us, it is inside of us, possibly a place we are yet to find.