When you besiege a city for a long time, making war against it in order to take it, you shall not destroy its trees by wielding an axe against them. You may eat from them, but you shall not cut them down. Are the trees in the field human, that they should be besieged by you? Only the trees that you know are not trees for food you may destroy and cut down, that you may build siegeworks against the city that makes war with you, until it falls.

— Deuteronomy 20

Gospel of the Trees is a website created by Alan Jacobs.

       It is the light that tugs,

       that teaches each

       acorn to defy the pull

       down, to interrupt

       horizontal space.

       And falling, filtering

       through the pale green leaves,

       it is rain that rises,

       then, like a spring

       at a sapling's heart. 

       It is wind that trains,

       toughens the wood.

       It is time that spreads

       the grain in rings --

       dark ripples in

       a slow pond.

From "The Meaning of White Oaks," Luci Shaw

And there was the oak tree in front of the house, much older than the neighborhood or the town, which made rubble of the pavement at its foot and flung its imponderable branches whose girths were greater than any ordinary tree. There was a torsion in its body that made it look like a giant dervish to them. Their father said if they could see as God can, in geological time, they would see it leap out of the ground and turn in the sun and spread its arms and bask in the joys of being an oak tree in Iowa. 

-- Marilynne Robinson, Home