Bedford Square Publishers, 2026
ISBN 978-1835011560
Reviewed by Bob Land
The title of Olivia Sprinkel’s To Hear the Trees Speak attracted me straight away. When I was small, I used to play in my great grandmother’s overgrown garden. There was a large shrub there which I always felt very close to. I clearly remember one summer’s day, I was sitting on a box, and I turned to ‘the tree’ as I had named it and smiled. I was feeling very happy and far from alone. Something had happened; something had been shared between us. I have never questioned this. Whatever it was, it was special enough that nearly sixty-five years later I still recall the event clearly and often.
The book has something for most tastes; it is a very good travelogue. Sprinkel’s travels around the world, had me green with envy. There is plenty of folklore too, and technical facts.
The book has some great quotes, my favourite being one from the storyteller Martin Shaw. “We don’t need new stories; we need to go back to the old ones.” This gives a clue as to the tone of the book. Our relationship with the trees is ancient. Folklore is full of it. If we are then capable of communicating with trees, it is it seems, a skill not to be learned but rather to be re-discovered.
The author’s first attempt at communication is in India, with a banyan tree. She simply sits with a notebook and lets ideas come along. Her guide had said “just be quiet.”
The tree soon indicated its participation, in that unlike her personal expectations perhaps, it directed her attention to its surroundings. The tree had awareness of other life in the immediate area. This awareness is multi-sensory too. The colours of butterflies and flowers, the scent of herbs, and the various sounds from the birds were experienced joyfully.
Olivia says on page 83, that she did not intend for her trip to be a spiritual journey, but I do not see how it could have turned out otherwise. Early in the book a quote from Terence McKenna clearly lays the blame for the suppression of “the voices of nature” at the door of Christianity.
The subject of ‘listening’ takes, as one might expect, a meditative turn, with Olivia discovering that in order to listen, she must first deal with the chatter of her own thoughts. Perhaps Buddhists have long known this? She is told that Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki had talked of teaching his students to listen to birds.
Our world is in trouble; the book has references to that as you would expect. But this is not simply another hand pointing to conservation needs. In many places the book takes on a poetic or other worldly quality. One can get a strong impression that something quite radical is taking shape. Something deeper than mere politics and legislation. It is about “rebalancing our relationship with the world.” I think that means that we humans need to do some changing too.
I can do no better than to quote Terence McKenna again, he referred to this rebalancing as the “re-sacralisation of the world.”