A Guide To Fictional Trees
Take a leaf out of these books and fanciful creations with our pick of the best talking trees, bratty bushes and shifty shrubs.From the Garden of Eden to Robin Hood and his merry jegging-wearing band of dudebros to Hansel and Gretel indulging in a spot of gingerbread-fuelled breaking and entering, woods, forests and individual trees have featured heavily in fairytales, myths and fantasy stories and uh, religions, since Eve treated the Tree of Knowledge like a 7-11. They’re dark, brooding places filled with snarling monsters, malevolent spirits and all-round bad juju, or, if you ate the wrong forest mushroom, they can be psychedelic pathways to blossom-filled glades of pixies doing the macarena around a rainbow-coloured campfire. Either way, that’s some scary shit.
Whomping Willow
When Hermione, Harry and Ed Sheeran’s second cousin meet this leafy douchebag, they don’t know what hit them, literally. The strong and silent type, this passive-aggressive plant in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series doesn’t speak, but does thrash about madly if trespassers get within cooee of a secret tunnel out of Hogwarts. Think of it as kinda the tree equivalent of a drunk hooligan, toddler chucking a tanty or self-destructing politician, pooching its bottom lip out and waving its limbs wildly to thump anything in its path. The Whomping Willow and the thorny #thuglife obstacle it presents protects Remus Lupin from being unmasked as a werewolf when he ducks into the Shrieking Shack for a quick makeover under a full moon. Known enemies of the tree include: schoolboys flying around in Ford Anglias, the Immobulus spell and the whole freakin’ universe if it comes too close. Why Hogwarts doesn’t call in the tree loppers to take care of the leafy pest and its bullyboy tactics and plant a nice rhododendron in its place is anyone’s guess. Remus could get some sort of enchanted dog kennel and everyone would be happy.
Faraway Tree
Enid Blyton’s four-book children’s series about the Faraway Tree may be the single greatest thing that happened to sexual innuendo since Mrs. Slocombe’s pussy on British sitcom Are You Being Served? Since 1939, kids have had the opportunity to snicker over cousins Dick and Fanny and their dodgy adventures involving the Enchanted Wood (gigglesnort). Sadly, the franchise underwent a language update in 2011 and the cousins were rebranded into the PC, but decidedly boring Rick and Frannie – boo, hiss. In any case, the Faraway Tree was a glorious creation with cray-cray characters like Moon-Face, Saucepan Man, Mister Watzisname and Dame Washalot dwelling amongst its branches. At the top of the tree, a revolving collection of cloudy domains delighted the children, including the Land of Do-As-You-Please, Land of Birthdays and the Land of Drink-Wine-and-Ugly-Cry-Watching-Love-Actually (no wait, that’s just every Friday night at ours). Blyton reportedly hated kids, but her books must have had something going for them – she’s sold 600 million copies and counting.
Ents
Nerdy nitpickers will no doubt tell you they’re technically not trees, but these talking treelike giants in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy scrape into this list because of the legally binding rules of hush-up and shush and just-go-with-it. The Ents are a doomed race in Middle-earth, part of the natural world edged out by human industry and our over-zealous purchasing of Ikea furniture. They can’t even reproduce by spoofing out a few saplings because they’ve lost their Entwives (careless), so basically they’re cactus and it’s all our fault. Well, it’s partly theirs since this is the age of victim-blaming after all. Ents who skip their cardio workout for the week and stay in one place for too long risk growing roots and becoming more treelike, but occasionally they’ll peel themselves off the couch and go to war with the elves, humans and dwarves with big hairy feet, helping the forces of good defeat the evil wizard Saruman. Treebeard and co bring the hurt on the enemy by hurling rocks, stomping on foes and generally trashing the joint like total rockstars.
The Giving Tree
Beloved by Debbie Downers around the world, this children’s book written in 1964 by Playboy cartoonist Shel Silverstein tells the story of the friendship between a little boy and an apple tree. Sounds innocent enough and everything’s hunky-dory until the boy does a runner and forgets about his leafy friend. One day, he returns and asks her for money. Lacking pockets or a cheque account she’s skint, but gives him her apples to sell. Likewise, she’s allegedly happy to give him her branches and trunk and used knickers to sell in a Tokyo vending machine (okay, that last one may not be true). Instead of growing some balls and telling the parasitic little punk to get a goddamn job, the tree keeps donating bits of herself until all that’s left of her is a stump, which the boy, as a sad old man, proceeds to sit on like the insensitive prick that he is. The message may be laudable – it’s better to spend quality time with loved ones than hit them up for cold, hard smooth every five seconds, but the book has attracted oodles of hate from environmentalists, over-protective parents and those who prefer warm, fuzzy endings to breeding kids who resemble Wednesday Addams.
Spaghetti Tree
You may consider the BBC to be the ancient ancestral home of fuddy-duddies, but they’re not above having a laff or two. On April 1, 1957 the British broadcaster aired a three-minute segment on serious news program Panorama reporting on a bumper spaghetti harvest in Switzerland. Thanks to the unusually mild winter causing the nefarious spaghetti weevil to shape up and ship out from the region, some lovely Swiss misses were able to pluck an abundance of pasta strands from trees and lay them out to dry in the sun for the cameras. This carb-laden concoction of cock-and-bull was cooked up by Panorama cameraman Charles de Jaeger in an era where sketti was still viewed as a new and exotic food in the UK. Many viewers believed the story and hundreds rang the TV station to settle family arguments over whether the Beeb was having them on. Others asked where they could get their hot little hands on a spag bol bush of their very own. The segment still goes down as one of the best April Fool’s Day hoaxes of all time and is believed to be first instance of trolling on TV. Neat.
