What is it about trees that pique our consciousness and throw us in awe? I think trees are the most magnificent things on the planet. Constable used to paint a particular elm tree, and comedian John Cleese admitted his earliest memory was looking up at a chestnut's symmetry. Do you have a tree? I carry several in memory: curves and breaks, weightless turrets and mullioned bark, eager sprouts, and weathered roots. I formed tree attachments early in life to those near our house and still feel muscular sorrow when I think how Dutch elm disease tore through our neighbourhood. 

From David Hockney's blooming fruit trees to James Canton's sentinel oaks, trees stand next to us, above us, woven in bones, and written in books that barely do them justice.

A tree need not be grand to matter, but if it is grand, it is impossible that it will not matter. "The Big Tree (Sequoia gigantea) is Nature's forest masterpiece," wrote John Muir (April 21, 1838 - December 24, 1914) in 1901, "And, as far as I know, the greatest of all living things." Born in Scotland, Muir moved to America with his family in 1849 and never left. He studied botany at school in the Midwest; after an accident that nearly blinded him, he reset his course and regained sight of the American West, spending years in California, among the glacier-forged valleys and Sequoia-covered mountains.

The Big Tree (Sequoia gigantea) is Nature's forest masterpiece, and, so far as I know, the greatest of living things. It belongs to an ancient stock, as its remains in old rocks show, and has a strange air of other days about it, a thoroughbred look inherited from the long ago–the auld lang syne of trees. Once the genus was common, and with many species flourished in the now desolate Arctic regions, in the interior of North America, and in Europe, but in long, eventful wanderings from climate to climate only two species have survived the hardships they had to encounter, the gigantea and sempervirens, the former now restricted to the western slopes of the Sierra, the other to the Coast Mountains, and both to California, excepting a few groves of Redwood which extend into Oregon.

Muir saw nature as the antidote to over-civilized, luxurious boredom, and winnowed 'eyes longing for a horizon' (to borrow from Emerson, a friend of Muir.) The westward movement of white civilisation in the 19th-century America saw a shift from exploratory frontierism to settlement. Muir was one of the few who went west not to conquer but to live in quiet rapture. In his 1901 essay on the Big Tree, he noted that the physical presence of Sequoia trees - the tallest tree, largest tree, and oldest collection of trees Muir notes - is greater than any words we have to describe it.

No description can give any adequate idea of their singular majesty, much less their beauty. Excepting the sugar-pine, most of their neighbors with pointed tops seem to be forever shouting Excelsior, while the Big Tree, though soaring above them all, seems satisfied, its rounded head, poised lightly as a cloud, giving no impression of trying to go higher. Only in youth does it show like other conifers a heavenward yearning, keenly aspiring with a long quick-growing top. Indeed the whole tree for the first century or two, or until a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet high, is arrowhead in form, and, compared with the solemn rigidity of age, is as sensitive to the wind as a squirrel tail. The lower branches are gradually dropped as it grows older, and the upper ones thinned out until comparatively few are left. 

These, however, are developed to great size, divide again and again, and terminate in bossy rounded masses of leafy branchlets, while the head becomes dome-shaped. Then poised in fullness of strength and beauty, stern and solemn in mien, it glows with eager, enthusiastic life, quivering to the tip of every leaf and branch and far-reaching root, calm as a granite dome, the first to feel the touch of the rosy beams of the morning, the last to bid the sun good-night.

Grant Sequoia tree named after U. S. President and Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant (a grand man in his own right). Photograph by John Muir.

The overwhelmingness of the Sequoia to a proximate human body is hard to describe. It is almost like a tree that has forgotten it is a tree. It grows up and out and up again as if it seeks to obscure itself from normal classification and break into new categories. The language of tree -  roots, seeds, crowns, and bark - are present, but in gargantuan, ancient proportions. 

The bark of full-grown trees is from one to two feet thick, rich cinnamon brown, purplish on young trees and shady parts of the old, forming magnificent masses of color with the underbrush and beds of flowers. Toward the end of winter, the trees themselves bloom while the snow is still eight or ten feet deep. The pistillate flowers are about three-eighths of an inch long, pale green, and grow in countless thousands on the ends of the sprays.

Muir's boundless love for this tree and the companionship he found in it was a lifetime effort of profound empathy. "There is no absolute limit to the existence of any tree." Except perhaps the limits we place on it, he suggests presently. Everything is big and vast about this Big Tree. Except the delicate, soft sound of seeds falling from the tree onto grass or stone, which is impossibly faint and understated. 

The same General Grant Sequoia - seemingly untouched - I took in 2009.

So how do you stand next to this beast? A Cronus among mortals? How does one stand in awe of Muir himself? A prolific author, an unparalleled advocate for the preservation of wild spaces, founder of the Sierra Club (the oldest and still most powerful environmental group in the United States), and a man who could not ignore the call of the mountains. His late-in-life essays on California's public, protected spaces, Our National Parks, published in 1901, are some of his best writing. 

John Muir.

Muir spent a lifetime learning and teaching how to be in nature. His contemporary compatriots, like writer Annie Dillard, who abided by presence in nature, and J. Drew Lanham's beautiful writing on how to witness—not possess—nature, heed his wisdom. Their foundation set the words of Muir, advice to be heeded:

"Little is to be learned in confused, hurried tourist trips, spending only a poor noisy hour in a branded grove with a guide. You should go looking and listening alone on long walks through the wild forests and groves in all the seasons of the year."

Muir, like so many early Americans, has a racist past when it relates to the Indigenous peoples of America; read the Sierra Club's considered exploration of Muir's moral ambiguity.