The Golden Bearing and the Looking Glass

Abstract

Trees uncannily echo humans in many ways. Their trunks and limbs have parallels with our own trunks and limbs. The ways in which trees put down roots, colonise, and even migrate, resonate with our own relationships to the landscape. Trees even raise questions of belonging, and what it really is to be ‘native’ to a place. Reuben Paterson’s The Golden Bearing offers a looking glass, a chance to explore the ways in which trees hold a mirror up to humans.