Trees are plants that people call trees - a term of dignity, not botany. Personification is intrinsic to treeness. A tree is a radically nonhuman thing, a modular organism, that humans exalt through misunder-standing as a person-like being: an individual with torso and limbs.
That's from Jared Farmer's Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees (Basic Books, 2022), 3. The clearly nonhuman tree (all these torsos and limbs come from one root) is in Viveiro de Coyoacán.
