Into the Woods

To Connect With Nature & Restore Your Soul

Soft Wood is represented in nature by the evergreens that stand at the top of the world in massive forests of centenarian trees in the Arctic Circle. The towering Redwoods and Sequoias of the Pacific Northwest. The coniferous trees of the boreal forest in the northern hemisphere. And the tropical evergreens of equatorial rainforests in the southern hemisphere.

Soft Wood are coniferous. That means they keep their foliage and their forest green color through all four seasons of the year. These seed and cone bearing evergreens have a vascular system that transports water, minerals and other nutrients from their root system to their needles, allowing these trees to grow much faster and taller and live longer than deciduous trees. Because of their unique design, these ancient green giants “live long and prosper”.

Soft Wood are woody plants, shrubs and trees from the conifer family that includes: cedars, cypresses, firs, hemlocks, junipers, pines, redwoods, and spruces. Most coniferous trees are evergreen with the exception of two deciduous conifers. Larches lose their needles in the autumn and the needles of the bald cypress turn a rusty red in the fall.

Softwood denotes the wood of gymnosperm trees. The term "gymnosperm" comes from the Greek composite word meaning "naked seeds". Unlike the ovules of angiosperms, which are enclosed within an ovary, the seeds of gymnosperms are not enclosed and therefore naked, leaving the seeds exposed to the elements. Gymnosperm seeds develop on the surface of scales or leaves, often in the form of cones.

Hardwood is from angiosperm trees. These flowering trees are deciduous and change color with the seasons. Unlike softwood trees, they go through the four stages of budding and blossoming in Spring, bearing and ripening fruit in the Summer, having their leaves turn colors and fall to the ground in Autumn and standing with bare naked branches through the Winter.

The term softwood does not necessarily mean that the wood of coniferous trees is any softer than the wood of hardwood trees. In fact, in both groups of trees, there are huge variations in the hardness and density of the wood. While the hardest hardwoods are much harder than any softwood, some hardwoods are softer than many of the softwoods. For example, the wood of the longleaf pine, Douglas fir, and yew are much harder than several hardwood trees.

What differentiates softwood from hardwood is the structure of their wood. Softwoods have a microscopic structure of wood fibers that transports and stores water. They also have impressive defensive mechanisms that make them more resistant to insect attack. And the lignified tissues in some conifers, that transports resin through canals, provides protection from injuries.

Hardwoods contain less non-structural elements and have a more complex structure than softwoods, which makes them grow much slower and to shorter heights. They have pores and vessel elements that conduct water and dissolved nutrients from the roots to their leaves and other plant parts. This porous quality tends to make hardwoods have a higher moisture content, which can cause disease from mold, mildew and fungi and attract insects, like termites.

It’s these extraordinary qualities that make softwood more ideal to work with in carpentry and the construction industry. They are the most widely used wood for timber milling, building materials, home/building construction, furniture craftsmanship, paper production and various types of manufactured boards. Softwood is the source of about 80% of the world's production of timber coming from Scandinavia and Russia, North America and China.

Soft Wood years are a great time to follow the path into the woods. Take a walk or hike in the forest. Hug a tree. Read a book in the shade of a tree. Go wildcrafting. Drink some pine tea. Or, forest bathe.

Into the forest I go

To lose my mind

and find my soul.

~ John Muir

Visit the Redwoods

Plan a road trip along the coast of Northern California to see the mighty redwoods or visit the Sierra Nevada mountains to see the giant sequoias. The coastal redwoods are the tallest, among the oldest, and one of the most massive tree species on Earth. The tree called “General Sherman”, is by volume, the largest tree on Earth. It grows in the Giant Forest, which has five of the ten largest trees in the world. And the oldest known tree, a Great Basin bristlecone pine, estimated to be 5,077 years old, stands in the White Mountains in California.

Walk in the Woods

A beloved childhood story of the many adventures of Christopher Robin with his woodland animal friends was set in the hundred acre wood. In A. A. Milne's books, the term "Hundred Acre Wood" referred to just one part of the greater forest the characters would go into and out of to visit Owl's house in the thicket and other parts of the forest. If you have a forest or wooded area near you, take a walk into the woods. Or, find one to visit and have your own woodsy adventure this year.

Protect the Forests

Visit some National Forests this year. Learn about differences between National Parks and National Forests. You can read some interesting blogs on the National Forest Foundation website. Study the history of the forest reserves and educate yourself about forest conservation. Consider looking into volunteer opportunities in your local nation forest or nature preserve. Plant some trees in your yard or community.

Hug a Tree

Like connecting to the Earth through grounding, hugging a tree also has health benefits. Similar to the energy exchange of standing barefoot on the earth, wrapping your arms around a tree allows you to release energy and emotions and receive the mood lifting and shifting effects of the calming and bonding hormone, oxytocin and the feel good, happiness hormones of serotonin and dopamine. Hugging trees can help with depression and healing trauma and accelerate the recovery from illnesses and injuries. The Wild Tree Adventures website lists 4 ways to hug a tree: cheek to trunk, using all four limbs, getting horizontal on fallen trees and getting a full face of tree to breathe in the scent of the pine.

Read a Book

The paper used to make books is from the pulp of softwood trees. Instead of reading books on a device or listening to audiobooks, visit your local thrift store or favorite bookseller and pick up some paperbacks to read. Better yet, read books about mythical forests, stories set in the woods or tales about woodland creatures.

Many stories, especially fairytales, have a dark forest or creepy woods for fictional characters to escape into or have their misadventures. Little Red Riding Hood goes into the woods to visit her grandmother and Hansel and Gretel are abandoned in a forest before finding a house made of gingerbread and candy. In the legend of the heroic outlaw, Robin Hood hid out with his band of Merry Men in the Sherwood Forest. And who can forget the Fire Swamp in the dangerous forest of The Princess Bride? Or, Anne Shirley, who was known to name local landmarks like lakes and lanes, calling a small patch of trees, near her beloved Green Gables, the Haunted Wood.

Belle, Snow White and Aurora all went into the woods for one reason or another. There are many retellings of fairytales like Beauty & the Beast’s, For the Wolf. The earliest known version of Sleeping Beauty was an Arthurian chivalrous romance entitled, Perceforest. And the classic Grimm story of two sisters living with their mother in a cottage in the forest has been retold in Snow & Rose.

While many of the books about enchanted forests or mysterious woods are in the fantasy or fairytale retelling genre and set in the Fall or Winter seasons, you can find books in other genres to read this summer. Start with Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Then, select a book from the non-fiction recommendations below or a memoir about hikes along the Pacific Crest or Appalachian Trails. Or, if fantasy is your thing, I recommend, From the Forest, A Search for the Hidden Roots of Our Fairytalesby Sara Maitland. Buy yourself a coffee table book of beautiful photographs of forests. Check out reviews on Good Reads or BookTube for books with a forest setting. Then, take your book into the woods to read under an evergreen.

To learn about trees, read some books by Peter Wohlleben & Jane Billinghurst or Oliver Rackham:

• Can You Hear the Trees Talking?

• Forest Walking

• Peter & the Tree Children

• The Heartbeat of Trees

• The Hidden Life of Trees

• The Power of Trees

• Walks in the Wild

• Woodlands

Memoirs

• At Home in the Woods by Bradford & Elvena Angier

• A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

• Walden or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau

• We Took to the Woods by Louise Dickinson Rich

• Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

Stories Set in the Forest or Woods

• Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier

• For the Wolf by Hannah Whitten

• Into the Forest by Jean Hegland

• Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder

• Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh

• Snow & Rose by Emily Winfield Martin

• The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

• The Fir Tree by Hans Christian Andersen

• The Forest by Edward Rutherford

• The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien

• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

• The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe (Chronicles of Narnia) by C.S. Lewis

• The Lorax by Dr. Seuss

• The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle

• The Overstay by Richard Powers

• The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

• The Winter Guest by Pam Jenoff

• The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy

• The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin

• Twilight by Stephanie Meyers

• Wildwood Dancing by Juliet Marillier

Make a Playlist

Create a playlist of instrumental music or songs that are forest themed. Or, make a playlist of videos with drone footage of forests that feature nature sounds like the rain or wind in the deep forest. Listen to The Memory of Trees song or album by Enya or the soundtrack to one of your favorite movies set in an ancient forest, like Avatar.

Wildcraft

Forage for treasures in the forest or local woodland area. Collect pinecones. Pick up pine boughs that have fallen. Gather some pine needles for teas or tinctures. Harvest some spruce tips and pine pollen. Then, head home to make a wreath, prepare a pine needle tea to sip on wile you do some woodsy crafts.

Drink in the Pine

In addition to their beauty, trees also provide us with clean air to breathe. They remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, store large quantities of carbon in their woody tissues and convert it into oxygen. The oxygen we need to live is continuously replenished by the process of photosynthesis, which uses the energy of sunlight to produce oxygen from water and carbon dioxide.

While we breathe in the oxygen rich air from trees in the forest, we can also inhale the healing properties of softwood trees. Pine trees emit immunity-boosting antimicrobial essential oils. For more on this read, Scent of the Pine.

Pine needle tea has been used in traditional Chinese medicine, as well as, Korea and Japan for centuries to promote health and facilitate healing. Pine needles are rich in vitamin C and have been used to treat scurvy. It has also been used as an expectorant to treat coughs and relieve congestion. Rich in vitamin A, the carotenoids in a pine needle extract can help to improve vision. Recent studies have shown that pine needle tea increases antioxidant defense and reduces inflammation, lowering blood pressure and improve blood cell production.

Drinking tea made from pine needles may also help with fighting depression and increasing mental clarity, reducing symptoms from allergies and regenerating the skin. The herbal tea is made from the fresh, dried or fermented needles of the Eastern White Pine (P. strobus), Loblolly, Virginia Pine, Long Leaf Pine, Korean Pine (P. koraiensis), Japanese Red Pine (P. densiflora) or Manchurian Red Pine (P. tabuliformis). You can also make or take a tincture made from pine needles.

Discover the benefits of supplementing with pine pollen. Pine pollen is the male fertilizing material that has a grainy and powdery texture. It comes from a variety of species of pine tree, such as: Masson’s pine (Pinus massoniana), Chinese red pine (Pinus tabulaeformis) and Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris). Pine pollen has been used to slow the aging process, reduce fatigue, boost testosterone, treat prostate disease and “cure” colds and flus.

The art of healing comes from nature, not from the physician.

~ Paracelsus

Forest Bathe

Shinrin yoku is the Japanese practice of forest bathing. The term was coined in 1982 by the head of the Japanese Ministry of Forestry to encourage people to connect with nature by visiting the forests that make up two-thirds of the island country. While at least 120 minutes a week of walking, sitting or standing in nature, is recommended, even five to ten minutes a day can be beneficial for your physical wellness, mental health and emotional wellbeing.

Studies show that there’s many positive health effects from having the presence of trees in our environment and spending time in green spaces. Being in the forest has physiological effects on the body, like reducing stress, boosting the immune system and improving heart health. Forest bathing has even been shown to increase the levels of natural killer cells which fight infection and the expression of anti-cancer proteins in females.

To forest bathe, engage all five of your senses. Leave your devices in the car or at home and walk through a forest at a slow pace. Take in the beauty of the trees and green scenery. Listen to the sounds in the forest - the birds, the insects, the wind through the trees and the sound of your footsteps on the path. Touch the ground, hug a tree and pick up a fallen leaf. Breathe in the scent of the pine and other forest fragrances. Taste the crispness of the clean air as you take in full deep breaths. Or, if you don’t have access to a forest, diffuse the scent of the pine with doTERRA’s nature blend called, Midnight Forest.

Into the woods, then out of the woods, and home before dark.

~ lyrics from Into the Woods

Share in the comments below your plans for going “into the woods” this Soft Wood year.

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