![]() Others thrum with life: the Ailanthus altissima in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and the banyan in Wu Ming-yi’s The Stolen Bicycle, a monster that could hold a whole company of soldiers in its branches and roots and still keep growing.Īt first we wanted to rank the trees, or pit them head-to-head, March Madness–style, to see which one came out on top. The results were eye-opening: as expected, Robert Frost made several appearances, but could anyone have guessed that two different marriages would spring from a dramatic reading of “Birches”? Some of the trees invoke the solemness of death: the mysterious conifer in Yusef’s Komunyakaa’s “Tree Ghost” and the potted orange tree in Valeria Luiselli’s Faces in the Crowd, the leaves on its bare branches replaced with post-it notes. To celebrate its publication, we asked our contributors and several of Orion’s editors to name their favorite tree from a book or poem. Recently, the editors of Orion selected the best works about trees from our archive for a new anthology, Old Growth. Trees are bigger than us and they usually outlive us-no wonder they loom large in our imagination. ![]() ![]() ![]() The Tree of Jiva and Atman in Vedic scripture, the Tree of Life in the Hebrew Bible, the withered poplars of the I Ching. ![]() They were there at the beginning, trees in literature, centuries before humans had the idea of putting literature on (the pulped, bleached, and pressed remains of) trees. ![]()
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