Sacred trees of the world
The trees people worship, plant at temples, and have died to protect — where belief and taboo have done the work of conservation.
- 01
Trees№ 0305 minBanyan and Strangler Figs: The Trees That Grow Downward and Kill Their Hosts
Figs that begin life in the treetops, send roots down to strangle the tree that hosted them, spread into forests of a single individual, feed half the rainforest — and depend on a wasp that lives one day.
- 02
Trees№ 0263 minBael: The Stone-Shelled Fruit Sacred to Shiva
A thorny citrus-family tree whose hard-shelled fruit hides a sweet aromatic pulp made into a cooling drink — and whose trifoliate leaves are the holiest offering to the god Shiva.
- 03
Trees№ 0213 minAshoka Tree: The Sorrowless Tree of Gods and Women
A small, sacred, orange-flowered tree woven through the myths of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism — associated with love, fertility, and 'the removal of sorrow' — and long a medicine for women, now over-harvested and threatened.
- 04
Trees№ 4053 minSal Tree: The Sacred Timber of the Buddha's Life
A towering dipterocarp that forms the great forests of northern India — the tree under which the Buddha is said to have been born and to have died, a premier timber, a source of resin, and a maker of leaf-plates.
- 05
Trees№ 2433 minKadamba: Krishna's Fragrant Orange Pincushion Tree
A fast tropical tree sacred to Krishna, hung each monsoon with fragrant orange flower-balls like glowing pincushions — a plant of Indian myth and poetry that is also a fast-growing plantation timber.
- 06
Trees№ 0773 minChampak: The Golden Magnolia of Temple and Perfume
A tall tropical magnolia whose small golden-orange flowers carry one of the most intoxicating scents in the plant world — sacred across South and Southeast Asia, worn in the hair, offered to the gods, and captured in fine perfume.
- 07
Trees№ 0624 minCannonball Tree: The Sacred Tree of Trunk-Grown Bombs
A rainforest relative of the brazil nut that flowers in gorgeous fragrant blooms straight from its trunk, then hangs it with huge, heavy, foul-smelling cannonballs — and is revered as sacred in India.
- 08
Trees№ 2324 minIroko: The African Teak and the Tree of Spirits
A durable golden-brown West African timber sold as 'African teak' — a fig-family giant revered as a dwelling of spirits, guarded by taboo, and armoured against the sawmill by stones inside its own wood.
- 09
Trees№ 0733 minCedar of Lebanon: The Tree of Kings and Scripture
The majestic flat-topped cedar that built Solomon's temple and the Phoenician fleets, appears on Lebanon's flag, and whose once-vast forests have been logged for five thousand years down to a few protected groves.
- 10
Trees№ 2523 minKhejri: The Desert Tree People Died to Save
The 'king tree' of the Thar Desert — a nitrogen-fixing legume that feeds people and livestock where nothing else grows, revered by the Bishnoi, and the tree at the heart of history's most famous environmental martyrdom.