Do Trees Have Genders?

One morning about two weeks ago, a friend of mine who runs a wonderful spiritual healing group on facebook put a post up asking if we were more in our head or our body that day. I was struggling with editing my book, in particular with sorting out tenses, knowledge of which suddenly seemed to evade me. So I said I was most definitely in my ‘head’.  She messaged me and said that I needed to find a ‘masculine’ tree on my walk to help. What the heck? I didn’t ask any further questions. 

Now I’m all for connecting with nature so decided as I went for a walk in the woods with my two dogs that I would take her advice, somewhat intrigued about the gender of trees. 

Having had a lovely chat with a random stranger who was a visitor to the area, I set off for on my ascent back to the car. This is quite a struggle for me with my disability so I decided to distract myself by looking at trees and trying to identify what the hell a ‘masculine’ tree looks like.  I noticed trees with knobbly bits or random branches sticking out at a height that I thought could be seen as their ‘private parts’. Masculine maybe? There was one, I kid you not, complete with testicles!  Other trees had holes, perhaps hiding a bees nest, but low enough down to be considered as feminine possibly? Have you ever looked at the trunks of trees and seen all the patterns and even faces you can pick out in the bark?

I become obsessed looking at the shape, curve and branches of every tree and then smiled as I wondered ‘is there even such a thing as feminine and masculine trees?’  Then I wondered if it had been a trick question from my friend, purely to get me really looking at nature and clearing my mind. Mmmn, well it worked! I chuckled to myself.

As came to the top of the hill, still smiling,  I came to a tall tree with no knobbly, bumpy or sticky out bits. No holes, or gaps, just a plain old perfectly straight tree standing there right in front of me.  I decided it was ‘gender-neutral’ and would pause to touch it to feel its energy. I waited for some passers-by to descend out of sight so they didn’t see the crazy dog lady grounding herself with a tree.  Then I thought, hey… let’s take a picture to send to my friend and tell her what a wonderful experience it was to discover the beauty of trees today! 

Now, I’m a bit like Alice in Wonderland… I tend to fall down the rabbit hole and then I get curious.

When I got home, I decided to google how to identify male and female trees and it seems that male trees have flowers to pollenate, whereas the female trees have flowers with ovaries and bear fruit. 

This can get tricky though because whilst some trees have only male or female flowers, there are many trees that contain flowers that feature both male and female genders.

In addition, there are also trees that do not contain any flowers at all, making it even harder to figure out the tree’s gender. Well, I think my tree was gender-neutral anyway! 

So, it would seem the tree-world with regards sexuality and gender is as diverse and complicated as ours! Nature really does work in mysterious ways!