Nature Speaks

On Christmas trees, memory, and the invisible histories that shape our perceptions

When I was a child, we had a small, scrawny artificial Christmas tree, brought out each December, its branches arranged as well as they could be, and returned to its box when the celebrations were over. My mother disliked Christmas and always chose to work on Christmas Day, and although I understood that nurses were needed in hospitals even when other families were gathered around their tables, I remember feeling disappointed that she would not be there.

She disliked the mess of fallen pine needles and discarded wrapping paper, and a real tree, with its uneven branches, its fragrance and its tendency to shed upon the carpet, was never something she wanted in the house. I remember looking at our little artificial tree and wishing, without quite knowing what I was wishing for, that Christmas might be different.

These days, choosing a real Christmas tree is one of the rituals I look forward to most. There is the pleasure of finding it, of bringing it home and carrying it through the doorway, the slight resistance of the branches against my hands and the resinous scent that gradually fills the room. I love the irregularities of its shape, the places where the branches grow too close together or leave unexpected gaps, and the way the decorations must find their own positions each year. One Christmas we brought home a tree so enormous that it scarcely fitted into the room, and although we have been rather more sensible about their size since then, I remember that particular tree with extraordinary affection. There are always needles to sweep from the floor, and by the time the decorations come down the tree has lost something of the freshness it possessed when we first carried it indoors, but I have never found these things particularly troublesome. Indeed, I suspect I would miss them.

I had always thought of this simply as a preference for real trees, until recently, while reading Kathy Willis’s Good Nature, I found myself wondering why something so ordinary should carry such different meanings for different people. Willis describes research involving Japanese schoolchildren who spent a short period looking at living pansies, an experience associated with measurable signs of physiological relaxation. When the flowers were replaced with convincing artificial versions, the same response was not observed. There are possible explanations involving scent and other subtle sensory differences, and a single study cannot tell us everything about the effects of living plants, but I was intrigued by the suggestion that two things might appear almost identical while our bodies respond to them differently.

A living plant is never quite still, even when it appears to be. Water moves through its tissues, gases are exchanged with the surrounding air, and its leaves respond to changes in light and temperature too gradual for us to observe. It carries within it the history of the soil in which it grew, of seasons of rain and drought, and of countless encounters with other living things. An artificial plant may reproduce its appearance with remarkable accuracy, but it does not share these processes, and perhaps some part of our experience of living nature takes place beyond what we consciously recognise. We may believe that we are responding simply to what our eyes can see, while our bodies are receiving information of which we remain almost entirely unaware.

Yet there is another kind of invisible presence that interests me just as much, one that belongs not to the plant but to the person looking at it. We do not arrive at an encounter without a history. Long before we have learned to examine our responses, we have begun to associate particular sights, sounds and smells with comfort or unease, affection or disappointment, belonging or exclusion. A certain quality of light may bring back the feeling of a childhood afternoon without recalling the afternoon itself, while the scent of something familiar may awaken a sadness or pleasure whose origins remain obscure. Sometimes we recognise the memory immediately; sometimes we feel its presence without knowing what has stirred. We may believe we are responding entirely to what stands before us, when something that happened many years ago is quietly taking part in the encounter.

I remember the Christmas trees that have stood in my living room over the years, their branches shaped by the seasons in which they grew, their fragrance rising from the needles and resin, and I realise that the pleasure I have taken in their presence cannot be explained entirely by any of these things. There are other trees there, too, although none can be seen: the little artificial tree of my childhood, the enormous tree that once filled our room, and all those we have brought home in the intervening years. Their memories have become entangled with the smell of evergreen, the feel of branches beneath my fingers and the small familiar task of finding somewhere to hang each decoration. Another person might stand before the very same tree and experience something quite different, perhaps remembering a childhood filled with warmth and anticipation, or a Christmas marked by absence, or an artificial tree that belonged to someone they loved. We could describe the tree in almost identical words, agreeing upon its height, its colour and the arrangement of its branches, while the experience of standing before it remained entirely our own.

It is curious how little of this we can see in one another. A person may hesitate before an apparently simple decision, become upset by a remark we intended kindly, or feel a sudden affection for something we regard as unremarkable, and we are left wondering why. We know the circumstances of the present moment, or believe that we do, but not necessarily the earlier experiences that have entered it. A familiar smell may carry someone back forty years; a particular arrangement of objects may awaken an uneasiness they cannot explain; an ordinary tradition may contain a happiness that has taken much of a lifetime to create. We meet one another in the present, yet none of us is made entirely of the present, and there are moments when what appears to be happening between two people is also taking place among memories that neither can fully see.

I have been thinking about this in relation to attention itself, and how readily we assume that looking more closely will allow us to see something as it really is. John Ruskin understood how easily the mind substitutes a familiar idea for the particular thing before it, and how drawing can reveal the poverty of what we thought we knew. We believe we understand the shape of a leaf until we attempt to follow the movement of its veins, the irregularity of its edges or the changing colour of its surface, and discover that we have been recognising it rather than truly observing it. Yet even when we learn to examine the outward details of something with extraordinary care, we may remain unaware of the memories and expectations through which we are interpreting what we see. The eye may become more attentive while the mind continues along familiar paths.

I notice something of this when I walk beside the river. There are mornings when the movement of the water seems wonderfully reassuring, its familiar sound accompanying my thoughts until they become less insistent, and others when the same water, passing over the same stones, leaves me strangely unsettled. The bare trees of winter may appear beautiful in their simplicity on one visit and melancholy on another, while the river itself has changed very little. I sometimes wonder whether I am seeing the landscape as it is, or seeing something of myself reflected in it, and whether the distinction can ever be made entirely clear. The comfort I feel is real, as is the sadness, but neither necessarily tells me very much about the river. It continues to flow according to rain, gravity and the shape of the land, while I arrive carrying whatever the day has brought me.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons art can change our relationship with the world so profoundly. A painting is never simply a record of what stood before the artist, but an expression of what was noticed, what was felt and what seemed worthy of being preserved. Two painters may stand in the same landscape and produce works so different that we might scarcely recognise them as representations of the same place, and yet each may reveal something the other has missed. I have often found that a painting changes the way I look at the world beyond it, drawing my attention towards a particular quality of light or the structure of a branch that I might otherwise have passed without noticing. The painting does not replace the landscape, but becomes part of the history through which I encounter it, so that the next time I stand beside a tree or look across a valley, something of another person’s attention is present within my own.

We carry these borrowed ways of seeing alongside our own memories, the knowledge given to us by science, the observations of artists and writers, and the habits of thought acquired in childhood. Sometimes they deepen our understanding; sometimes they make it difficult to recognise anything that does not fit what we already believe. We may become so accustomed to a particular interpretation that it begins to seem inseparable from the thing itself, and only when another person responds differently do we discover that what appeared obvious to us was never quite as certain as we imagined.

Even the question of whether a real Christmas tree is better for the environment becomes more complicated when examined beyond our immediate preferences. A locally grown tree, cultivated for Christmas and chipped or composted afterwards, may have a relatively modest environmental impact, while an artificial tree requires energy and materials to manufacture but can be used for many years. The balance depends upon how the trees are grown, transported, used and disposed of, and the answer is not necessarily the one suggested by the appearance of something natural or manufactured. I find myself wondering how often our affections quietly become convictions, how readily we mistake the strength of a feeling for the certainty of a fact, and how many of the judgements we make about the world have been shaped by experiences we have long since ceased to remember.

There is something both unsettling and strangely consoling in the possibility that our responses are not fixed, that an association formed in childhood may gradually be altered by the experiences of later life, and that something once connected with disappointment can become the source of an entirely different feeling. We cannot return to the past and change what happened, but the meanings we carry from it are not always as permanent as they seem. New memories gather around old ones, familiar objects acquire unexpected associations, and sometimes we find ourselves loving something we once regarded with indifference, or looking upon a place we have known for years as though we were encountering it for the first time.

I think again of the enormous Christmas tree that scarcely fitted into our room, its branches reaching further than we had anticipated, and of the pleasure we took in it despite its impractical size. I remember the smell of the needles, the decorations hanging among the branches and the way the room seemed transformed by its presence. The tree has long since gone, and I cannot remember every detail of that Christmas, yet something of it returns whenever we go to choose another, just as something of my childhood returns, although the feeling it awakens is no longer quite the same.

Soon we will bring another tree into the house, and I will run my fingers along its branches, breathe in the familiar fragrance and consider whether it will fit comfortably into the room. Somewhere within that small pleasure will be the little artificial tree of my childhood, the enormous tree that once filled our room, and all the Christmases that have passed between them. None will be visible among the branches, yet I wonder whether I could ever look at this new tree without them.

And somewhere, in another house, someone will be bringing out an artificial tree, carefully unfolding its familiar branches, perhaps remembering a person who is no longer there, or a Christmas they would give anything to experience again.

Original artwork by Jane Maye: a spruce branch impression with details added by hand in pen.