Students in Religion of Trees selected images from Manuel Lima's Book of Trees to talk about today, sometimes for quixotic reasons - we learned as much about each other as about the images! So this 8-9th c BCE Egyptian Lotus tree was chosen because it's different from lotus imagery in Asian art - but also because a student liked that the tree and the human were the same height. Others included Hans Sebald Behan's "Fall of Man" (1525-27), because of the skull; Yggdrasil, c. 1680 for its colors; a 19th century painting of the marriage of Shiva and Parvati, because a tree sheltered 
the gods; Konchog Gyaltsen's "Tsongkhapa refuge host field tree" (18th c.) because the central teacher is like the heart of a tree; Gustav Klimt's "Tree of Life" (1901) because of the spirals; Ramon Llull's Porphryian Tree (1512) because of its symmetry; a 16th century map of papal bulls for its order pruned out of disorder; and finally a 1663 image of Llull's "Tree of Science" for its asymmetry and its inclusion of roots.What became clear was that, contrary to the claims of Lima, these "tree diagrams" really are not all doing the same thing, or even trying to. Maybe knowledge, or the cosmos, or life, or the transmission of teachings are like trees - but which trees, and in what respects?
Manuel Lima, Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge (Princeton Architectural Press, 2014), 18, 20, 22-25, 28, 33, 37
