Sheila Heti, Pure Colour: “She hadn’t known that plants were the grateful recipients of all consciousness—not only of people, but of snails and squirrels and the sun and the rain; that it was their generosity that made them so lush and green, the very colour of welcome. Was every tree so peppered with the consciousness of snails and squirrels and people and bees? And what will happen to her in the autumn? Is that when she will really be dead? No, perhaps then she’ll retreat into the trunk of the tree. Perhaps that’s what makes trees so magnificent: that as generous and accepting as their leaves are, their trunk is even more accepting. It welcomes one and all. Then the tree will let her slip out again, back through its branches as it buds in the spring. But what if the tree is cut down? Perhaps she’ll go into the next tree, then she’ll go into the next one, and she’ll just keep on going–into the soil or whatever’s left; particles from a distant sun.” (p. 98)

Michael Christie, Greenwood: ” Even when a tree is at its most vital, only ten percent of its tissue—the outermost rings, its sapwood—can be called alive. All the rings of inner heartwood are essentially dead, just lignin-reinforced cellulose built up year after year, stacked layer upon layer, through droughts and storms, diseases and stresses, everything that the tree has lived through preserved and recorded within its own body. Every tree is held up by it own history, the very bones of its ancestors.” (484)