The Queen Tree

What a decade of returning to the same tree taught me about rest, resilience, and paying attention

The Queen

There is a tree in my local park that I have been visiting for ten years now. I call her the Queen Tree, which is simply what she is, the largest and oldest presence in that particular stretch of park, the one your eye finds first no matter what season you arrive in. I started going back to her the way you start going back to anything that makes you feel better, quietly, without a plan, because something in you knows what it needs even when your thinking mind is still catching up.

Over ten years, she has shown me things I was not looking for and could not have found any other way. She has shown me how to rest without guilt, how to stay rooted when something difficult is moving through, and how to extend yourself generously toward the people around you without depleting what is essential. I did not learn these things by thinking about them under her branches. I learned them by showing up, season after season, and paying attention to something that was doing all of those things without effort or fanfare, which is its own kind of teaching.

I like to sit with my back against her trunk and close my eyes. There is sound in a tree that you only hear when you stop moving, the particular way wind moves through leaves at different speeds, the creak and settle of old wood, the busy, purposeful life of birds and insects in the canopy. I do not understand any of it in a translatable way, and I have made my peace with that. Not everything worth listening to needs to be decoded. Sometimes the listening itself is the point, the act of going quiet enough to notice that the world is conducting an enormous amount of business entirely without you, which is, depending on the day, either humbling or an enormous relief.

The Japanese have a word for what happens when you sit against a tree and let it do its work on you: shinrin-yoku, which translates roughly as forest bathing, and which the Japanese Forest Agency formally introduced as a public health practice in 1982. The research that has followed is genuinely compelling. A systematic review and meta-analysis published in Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine, which screened 971 articles and included 22 studies, found that cortisol levels were measurably and significantly lower in people who spent time in forest environments compared to those in urban settings, both before and after their time among trees. You do not have to believe in anything to receive that benefit. You simply have to be there, which is the most democratic prescription I have ever encountered.

She is, in the truest sense, both therapist and oracle, though she works nothing like either one you might find in a book or an office. She does not reflect your words back to you or offer a diagnosis. What she does is older and more direct than that. She receives you completely, in whatever state you arrive, and holds you in her particular kind of attention, which is total and unhurried and entirely without judgment. I have sat with her in the hardest years of this past decade, the kind where certainty felt like something other people had, and she did not fix anything or tell me what to do. She simply remained, rooted and present and indifferent to my timelines, which was, it turned out, exactly what I needed. As for oracle, she speaks in the language of what is actually happening, the slow truth of seasons, the evidence of what survives difficulty and what does not, the quiet reminder that the same tree that stood bare and austere in February is the one drowning in green abundance by July. If that is not prophecy of a kind, I do not know what is.

She has also reminded me, without meaning to, of my responsibility toward the living world. When you love a particular tree you become, slowly and without drama, someone who notices trees more broadly, who pays attention to what is being planted and what is being cleared, who feels something specific and protective about the green infrastructure of your own neighborhood. Stewardship, the word itself feels large, but it begins in small and personal ways, with one tree in one park and the decade of ordinary mornings you gave to each other.

Go find your tree if you have not found one yet. It does not need to be grand or ancient or in a particularly beautiful setting. It just needs to be somewhere you can return to across the seasons, somewhere you can sit down and be quiet and notice what is actually happening in the living world right next to you. That noticing, done consistently over time, will give you something. I am honestly not sure exactly what to call it, but after ten years with the Queen Tree, I am certain it is worth the walk.

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Libby DeLana is the author of Do Walk: Navigate Earth, Mind and Body. Step by Step (The Do Book Co.) and Cold Joy (Chronicle Books, Fall 2025), and the co-host of the This Morning Walk podcast.