Ancient and Magnificent Trees That Look Straight Out of a Fairy Tale

The Bowthorpe Oak is a massively thick, millennium-old tree in Lincolnshire, England that once was rumored to hold three dozen people in its enormous, hollowed-out trunk. Beth Moon photographed the leafy giant some 15 years ago and was struck by its solemn nobility and overwhelming presence. Thus began a pilgrimage that would take her around the world to document the planet’s most ancient trees.

The series and corresponding photo book, Ancient Trees: Portraits of Time, is a collection of beautiful, stoic images that feel suspended in time. Though our distant ancestors left the shelter and safety of trees some 3.5 million years ago, Moon’s work points to our enduring affinity for—and exploitation of—really, really big trees.

“They’ve survived through so much—some for more than 4,000 years,” she said. “I find it hard to wrap my mind around it and I’ve been doing this work for 15 years.”

Moon shoots black and white film with a medium format Pentax camera. She then uses a labor-intensive platinum printing process that lends these images a rich tonal scale and nearly three dimensional appearance—always on the same naturally deckled, deeply textured Arche Platine paper made by a French mill since 1492. Platinum, like gold, is a stable metal. Her prints could last thousands of years, much like the ancient trees she photographs.

From Mexico to Madagascar, she came to find that trees so grand often have wonderful stories to tell—the massive trunk of the Major Oak where Robin Hood’s gang allegedly hid out; the gnarled, gothically dense Wittinghame Yew where a Scottish noble’s murder was planned in 1567; South Africa’s Sagole Big Tree where anti-apartheid fighters found shelter in the 1970s. “Everyone has a favorite tree story, and I just love to hear them,” said Moon.

Now the photographer has epic tree stories of her own. Moon tried for three years to shoot dragon’s blood tree —a wild looking thing “kind of like a gigantic umbrella blown inside out.” The tree is found only on Socotra Island, located 150 miles east of the Horn of Africa and controlled by Yemen. It was difficult to gain access. At customs and immigration, a PBS crew in line right in front of her was detained and had all its gear confiscated by Yemeni officials. Moon fortunately had a fixer with strong tribal ties help her make it through.

Socotra once had a forest of dragon’s blood trees, but aggressive goat grazing, over harvesting, and diminishing cloud cover have left only an endangered handful of these giants straddling the island’s Haghier Mountains. SocotraIslanders—mostly goat herders, date farmers, and fishers—are allowed to tap the dragon’s blood trees twice annually to collect its scarlet resin, which they use for paints, dyes, and medicine. “This place is literally untouched by time and the weather is so hard—there’s these monsoon winds,” she recalled her nights camped out there. “To sleep right under these trees and take advantage of the best light, that’s something like I’ve never seen.”