I’ve always been a plant-person, soil under nails, moss and lichen in my hair. The Irish landscape I grew up in is riddled with stone walls, stories and countless fairy trees. Irish place names are derived from hidden histories and trees.

Ireland’s medieval Ogham, sometimes called a “tree alphabet,” ascribed trees for letters. The characters were called feda, “trees,” or nin, “forking branches,” due to their shapes. This ancient writing was read from the ground up – each character sprouting from a central line, like branches on a tree.

Written on bark, it is no coincidence that some of the first forms of writing used trees. Our capacity to produce language is innate, like a tree's ability to produce leaves. Buds burst with potential stories. Words are alive, emerging from and evolving with culture.

I created a Tree Alphabet – a new ABC – by taking each of the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet and creating a corresponding tree drawing. These new “characters” were converted into a font: a typeface that I call Trees. This font lets us type with Trees, translating our letters into trees, words into woods and stories into forests. The Tree Alphabet is a living alphabet that can be planted, allowing us to seed stories, watch them sprout and grow . It’s also at the heart of my new book, The Language of Trees.

Katie Holten nestles in a tree (Picture: Dillon Cohen)

The Language of Trees is an archive of human knowledge filtered through branches of thought. I hope the book takes readers on a journey – from prehistoric cave paintings to creation myths, from Tree Clocks in Mongolia and forest fragments in the Amazon to Emerson’s language of fossil poetry – unearthing a grove of beautiful stories along the way.

We have much to learn from trees. S cientists study tree communities, inspiring ways for us to learn from – and live with – the natural world. They show how trees talk to each other using mycorrhizal fungi, an underground hyphal network.

This natural language exists beyond our understanding of communication because trees “speak” in frequencies that humans can’t perceive. We can hear leaves rustle, branches creak and squeak in the wind, but trees make more sounds that are inaudible to the human ear but discernible by other beings. For example, trees undergoing stress form tiny bubbles inside their trunks creating ultrasonic vibrations.

Artists, writers, activists, musicians, engineers, philosophers, farmers, educators have loved and learned from trees. Historians, linguists, and mathematicians use tree forms to understand the world.

A few years before I was born, Christopher Stone, a Professor of Law at the University of Southern California, had an epiphany while speaking with his students – what if trees, like people, had rights? Today the movement to recognise these Rights of Nature is inspiring people around the world, with Indigenous communities leading the way.

Almost all successful Rights of Nature cases – so far – protect bodies of water. Why not trees? The Climate Emergency demands that we learn the languages of trees and speak on their behalf.

Learning other languages creates empathy, compelling us to reconsider our relationships with other beings. If trees have memories, respond to stress, and communicate, what can they tell us? And will we listen?

Listening, speaking, reading and writing are how humans communicate and make sense of the world. The alphabet is how we organise information and knowledge; our networked world depends on it. Trees, the font, lets us renew our relationships with language, landscape, perception, time, memory and reading itself by slowing the reader down to decipher words in the woods.

Translation is perhaps the most intimate form of reading. When we translate our words into glyphs, such as trees, it forces us to reread everything. The Tree Alphabet forces us to revisit the past, re-present the present, and reimagine the future by translating or rewriting what we think we already know.

And so letter by letter, tree by tree, we can reforest our stories, communities and our imaginations, reimagine public spaces, reconsider “monuments” and restore biodiversity while rewilding language.

History shows us that we become the stories we tell ourselves and our children. What stories do we want to leave behind? What do we want our ancestors to remember us for?

People and trees have always been entwined. When we protect plants, we protect ourselves.

Today we are teetering on the edge of extinction along with most of life on Earth. The Amazon is on the verge of tipping from life-sustaining rainforest to savannah. Our civilisation is sleepwalking into apocalypse.

But when I’m at climate protests I am surrounded by thoughtful, kind, powerful, joyful, determined people fighting to protect people, plants, water, trees and truth by working to create a better world. We need to nurture their messages of hope.

The alphabet is magic, a way to love the world intimately. With these 26 little letters we can create any word in the universe. Letters of the alphabet are like seeds planted on a blank page.

I offer the Tree Alphabet as a gift for those who want to fall in love with the world by rewilding their words.

Learning the language of trees can help us think like the multicellular organisms that we are, inspiring new ways to live and work together. Trees can help us rewrite the broken stories that we have been telling ourselves.

Today, in this time of planetary emergency, we need to reread origin stories and rediscover other ways of living in harmony with our kin. Beautiful re-imaginings are happening everywhere – people are rewilding, reforesting, restoring and creating radical hope.

I offer The Language of Trees as a celebration of trees and our entangled relationship with them. I hope the book inspires us to consider how our human nature might re-merge with the state of nature.

The book is also a call to action. An ecological civilisation based on Rights of Nature is a survival imperative.

Please join me in declaring emergency and advocating for the Rights of Nature, the rights of trees, forests, peatlands, rivers, and planet Earth.

When I feel overwhelmed by what we’ve caused – climate change, pandemics, poverty, biodiversity loss, migration, war, ecocide – I find solace in the beauty of the living world, especially in trees. Trees are truthful. They fill my heart with joy. Their simplicity and quiet beauty – alone on a city pavement or together in a forest – slows down time.

“Tree Time” occurs in ever widening circles, like tree rings. If humans moved away from "Flat-Time” thinking and embraced Tree Time we would understand that time is not linear. Past and future are as real as now, meaning our actions today will resonate with as yet unfurled leaves on our family tree.

Trees breathe out. We breathe in. Another world is possible. Together – with trees – we must breathe her into being.

The Language of Trees by Katie Holten is published by Elliott & Thompson in hardback, £16.99

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Katie Holten explains why she created an alphabet based on trees