I read a lot of books in my job. And over the last several years, I've noticed an intriguing trend. Trees are popping up everywhere.
Richard Powers won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2019 for his novel The Overstory – a book which paid as much attention to the trees as it did the people below its branches.
A year later, the Canadian writer Michael Christie published Greenwood – a book where the story structure itself was modelled on the rings of a tree.
The trend can be found in Australian books, too. In Hannah Kent's 2021 novel Devotion, the heroine Hanne can hear the trees speak, while a hoop pine tree saves two lives in Melissa Lucashenko's Miles Franklin-winning Too Much Lip.
So why are trees in fiction having a moment? Well, for a start, they make for a great metaphor. Trees allow authors to examine themes like roots and connection, birth and regrowth, and the family tree. There's also the inescapable fact that when you hold a book in your hand, you are holding something made from a tree itself.
And then there are scientific advancements. As experts continue to discover new things about trees – their ability to communicate, for example – novelists are grabbing on to new narrative possibilities.
Finally, there's the environment. As the realities of climate change become ever more apparent, authors are feeling an urgency to write about the natural world. And what better symbol of nature than a tree, a giant standing over us for hundreds of years, observing all?
So, in honour of the ABC's Science Week – which this year is focussed on trees — here are five memorable trees to meet in fiction.
Fig Tree: The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
A loving – and sometimes boastful — fig tree narrates this gorgeous novel, which was shortlisted for this year's Women's Prize for Fiction.
The ancient tree grows inside a tavern in Nicosia in Cyprus, and witnesses a love affair between a Turkish Cypriot woman (Dephne) and Greek Cypriot man (Kostas) in 1974, the same year that civil war breaks out.
A cutting of the tree is later taken to London, where Kostas raises the couple's lonely child, Ada.
The transplanted fig tells us, "Trees are never lonely. Humans think they know with certainty where their being ends and someone else's starts. With their roots tangled and caught up underground, linked to fungi and bacteria, trees harbour no such illusions. For us, everything is interconnected."
Hoop Pine: Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko
This tree plays a vital role in Melissa Lucashenko's funny and heartbreaking novel, which won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2019.
The tree sits on a riverbank on Bundjalung country in northern New South Wales. This bend in the river is a sacred place for our protagonist Kerry Salter and her family – immortalised in family legend as the place where her Aboriginal grandmother turned to face the white men determined to kill her.
Lucashenko writes:
"Right there, Kerry thought, where the shadow of the hoop pine is blackening the water and the sand. That's where Granny Ava swam to save two lives, and made it."
"If there had been no hoop pine root there to pull herself out of the river by… there would be no Kerry floating in the sun, gazing down at the silver flashes of school mullet beneath her."
Faraway Tree: The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton
It just wouldn't be a list of literary trees without this one.
The Faraway Tree first appeared in the Enid Blyton's The Yellow Fairy Book in 1936. And while the names of the kids have changed over the years (Fanny and Dick are now Frannie and Rick), the giant tree itself has remained unchanged, with its ladder reaching towards changing magical lands, and the "slippery slip" within its trunk that guides the children back to the ground.
For nearly 90 years, the Faraway Tree books have delighted children – and adults too. Australian author Andy Griffiths cites the Faraway Tree as direct inspiration for his hugely popular Treehouse series of books, created with Terry Denton.
"(The books were) always exciting and some of it was pleasurable, some of it was scary, but you never knew what was going to happen next," he told the Big Weekend of Books in 2021.
"When I write books I want that [same] combination of fun, danger and not-knowing what was going to happen."
Plum Tree: The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar
Shokoofeh Azar's sumptuous novel opens in Iran in 1988. A woman achieves spiritual enlightenment at the top of a plum tree at the exact same moment that her only son is hanged without trial. The woman later retreats to nature in a state of "forest melancholia".
The greengage, or plum tree, is native to Iran. It stands as a powerful symbol of the country, in a book which blends classical Persian storytelling techniques with clear-eyed accounts of atrocities committed in the years after the Islamic Revolution.
And while you won't find any gum trees in this book, there is an Australian connection. Azar wrote it here, after coming to Australia as a refugee in 2011. The book, which was written in Farsi, went on to be shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
River Gum: Hovering by Rhett Davis
This ancient gum tree is witness to a changing city in Australian writer Rhett Davis's genre-bending debut novel.
The book is set in the fictional city of Fraser, which takes inspiration from the cities of Geelong and Melbourne in Victoria. Overnight, the city changes shape, with letterboxes and even whole houses moving to other parts of town. Taxis change colour and freeways change directions.
The centuries-old river gum, however, stays put – a steadfast presence in a book about the confounding rate of change in modern life, including the effects of climate change.
"I'm quite obsessed with trees, generally," Davis told ABC RN's The Book Show.
"As I was writing the novel, I walked a lot along the Barwon River in Geelong and there's quite a few river gum trees there that have … these centuries of age.
"They're just extraordinary things, to still see around despite the fact that we've built so close to them and almost, almost gotten rid of them."
