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Good morning. I think we all respond to trees, and it’s been good to have listeners on this programme talking about their favourite ones.
I think we’re particularly lucky that so many of our cities have streets which are lined with trees. In London we’re especially blessed in having so many wonderful planes planted by our Victorian ancestors, soaking up pollution, delighting the eyes and refreshing the spirit.

I’m not surprised that the people of Sheffield were so distressed when many of their trees were cut down. Near where I live, a giant poplar had to come down for safety reasons. Now it lies on the ground like a giant Greek warrior slain in battle. When the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins saw a row of poplars cut down near Oxford, he cried out in pain, ‘All felled, felled, are all felled’. Another poet, Charlotte Mew, who died in 1928, also wrote a poem of great distress about the plane trees at the end of her garden coming down, which ends ‘All day, I heard an angel crying ‘Hurt not the trees’.

Trees are not only magnificent above, we now know they have the most amazingly complex root systems with some kind of communication going on with other trees. And, not least, trees with their capacity to store carbon are fundamental to the future of the planet. We need more trees and we’ll continue to value the ones we have, some of them so magnificent, awesome in their capacity to endure. When I stand outside our local church under the great yew tree, I remind myself it was here long before I was, and could still be standing hundreds of years into the future.

I have two favourite references to trees in the Bible. In the description of the Eternal City given in the last book, a river runs right down the centre, with a tree of life growing on either side whose leaves are for ‘the healing of the nations.’ Then, in the very first psalm, the person who follows the way of life given by God is likened to ‘a tree planted by the water-side that will bring forth his fruit in due season.’ These are trees-and people- that flourish because they’re deeply rooted and nourished.

For a person of faith, this rootedness is in God. Trees for many retain a spiritual quality, and I think all of us, whether we’re religious or not, find refreshment and nourishment through them.

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