My father loved the natural world; he adored his garden. In the last days of my father’s life my brother turned his bed so that his closing view of the world would be that garden he so carefully tended. As it happens, today, Earth Day 2026, is the anniversary of his death.
Therefore, I will focus on what my father saw through that window – the trees.
I have always liked trees, but that fondness has grown through the years into deep love and respect. Ancient trees are like beneficent sages in our instant-gratification world. They slow us down and, without words but in a language which our spirit recognises, call us to be mindful. Stopping still among the trees, especially at night, when the rushing world grows quieter, we feel ourselves connected to a deeper and greater life. These are the hours which the mystic, Rebbe Nachman of Breslav, described as the time of the sifting of the spirits and their purification.
That is why, when I have the opportunity, I like to be among trees at night. Sometimes I have to walk for hours before the noisy discourse in my mind grows weary of itself and I begin to listen. I fantasise that the trees I pass in the meantime have the forbearance to understand: ‘It’s not worth talking to him now; we’ll wait until he’s ready to hear.’ The patience of trees outlasts that of humans not by hours but by decades and centuries. Then the moment comes: I pause beside a birch tree, halt on the woodland path, stop at the corner of a field beneath a solitary oak, wonder at a stand of old Scots pines, wind-bent survivors of the massacres of the forests, because my spirit has become still enough to hear the trees calling to me to stop and listen.
Trees have their own language: their vocabulary is formed from the hidden riches of the earth, from subterranean microbes and fungi, from the minerals and water they draw up from far beneath the ground. What they say is what they are: their quiet drawing up of life out of the elements of soil and water, their breathing out of life-preserving air, their reaching forth with twigs and leaves into the light, their letting go of their yellow and amber leaves in autumn, their long, bare patience in the bough-beaten winter, their steady provision of refuge to the homeless birds and restless squirrels, their gift of shade from their canopies above, the nesting holes they offer in the cups and cavities of bark and branch, and the reassuring consolation of their interwoven root work. We humans, too, are sustained on every level by these ancient communities of trees.
Alan Simons, a deeply missed member of my community who died too young, wrote to his sister when he was a first-year student and she was just nine:
‘Listen to the trees, for they have much to teach us. The trees were here before we came and will be still when we leave. So, treat them kindly for they are old and wise… Listen to them talking to the wind as you lie in your warm bed… for you may find joy in their conversation…. It does us good [to remember] those places where there is strength and stillness.’
All this is why I am distraught by the needless destruction of trees and why I am passionate about the restoration of our forest here in the UK and across the world.
Suzanne Simard opens her remarkable work Finding the Mother Tree with the acknowledgement that it is ‘not a book about how we can save the trees,’ but ‘a book about how the trees can save us.’ We need the trees to save us physically, mentally and spiritually.
Twice, while I sat with him in the closing days of his life, my father, who was seemingly no longer conscious, sat up momentarily in his bed and said the words from the daily Jewish liturgy: ‘God keeps faith with those who sleep in the dust.’ I could not ask him how he understood those words, but I take them as a deep belief in the continuity of life. I imagine that’s what he saw in the trees in his beloved garden: ‘They will be there for my children’s children, and for all the generations, brining life and hope to this crazy, rushing, fragile world.’
That is why I’m determined to be a tree planter, not a tree uprooter. I’ve planted trees in London with Thames 21, in Essex with The Woodland Trust, and with people of different faiths in Israel. I often think of the poet Rachel’s beautiful lines about what her life has meant to her:
Just a tree my hands have planted by the Jordan’s quiet shores
Just a path my feet have trodden upon your earth.
That, too, is why I’m running the London Marathon MyWay route for Tree Aid, to support people, especially women and children, and the climate, the birds and the animals at the same time.
May peace return, and all the trees, and all peoples, thrive. May this Earth Day bring blessings to all life.
Support my run for Tree Aid. Trees have the communicative roots and sheltering branches to protect the future of all life.
