The Fire Trees
"On a Sunday morning, as the parish bells sounded in the distance, it was his habit to walk beside his trees, not to pray but to commune with his congregation. The vaults, walls and steeples of his church were made of living wood, not the inert, processed wood of pew and pulpit. As birds sang their exquisite hymns from branch and bough, celebrating the simple joy of being alive in a way that no chorister could hope to emulate, he found a peace that had always eluded him on consecrated ground."
"He’d never been able to understand the widely held human perception that trees were dull and insensate, each as unremarkable as a telegraph pole or electricity pylon. In reality, every tree was as unique as any individual human being, and every one fostered and nurtured a diverse range of life in a way that no human could ever hope to match. It was in fact difficult to imagine anything more alive, in the fullest sense of the word, than a tree, by comparison to which most humans were shuffling somnambulants locked in an endless stupefaction. More than that he had come to see the trees as sky-hooks, anchoring the planet’s atmosphere and preventing it from drifting away into space. Had they not been capable of performing such a Newtonian effort, the Earth would have been little more than an airless and barren asteroid."
"He could only guess at the age of his companions; they were older by far than his house, ancient sentinels that may have taken root at the beginning of the last century. Somewhere in the deep archive of their trunks was buried the sound of Messerschmitt and Spitfire, dueling in the skies of England, more than half a century ago. Along with the ominous drone of the V1 flying bomb (a sound like a puttering motor boat about to stall), a blind automaton unleashed by the Germans when the war was already lost. Did those hidden rings, which marked the passing of the years as accurately as any artificial clock, also record the sound of cannons firing on the Somme, as well as every note of bird song that had ever fallen upon the air in their vicinity?"
"Perhaps a faint echo of all those sounds, and many more, had indeed reached these silent bastions, to be buried away beneath their barks, like chemicals leaking into the Turin Shroud."
From the short story collection, The Last Aviator
The aviator, old now and ready to sleep, walks through the trees at the end of his garden, "the remnants of a much larger conclave, from before the great industrial reaping, from a time when the trees still held sway. Such an age might have been called the Dendritic, a time when the British Isles were truly green, before the advent of the motorised saw and the lumberyard, before the arrival of the arboreal equivalent of the butcher’s knife and the abattoir."