Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Von Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

Each week we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

William Bryant-Logan is the author of Sproutlands, oak, air, and dirt.

He is a certified arborist and serves on the faculty of the New York Botanical Garden.

In this essay, William visits a 2,000-year-old linden tree in England that has been coppiced

or periodically cut back to stimulate growth throughout its life, prompting him to bring

forward this age-old symbiotic relationship between humans and trees, one that constitutes a history of fruitful exchange.

Each of the four clock faces on London's Big Bend is 23 feet in diameter, each minute-hand 14-feet-long.

Not 100 miles away in Gloucestershire is an older, bigger circle that marks a surer, deeper time.

It does not need to be wound.

A flock of starlings or a heavy snowfall, settling on a minute

hand, won't slow it. It is never down for maintenance. It consists of a ring of living

stools of a single linden tree, knots of slender stumps, eight to twelve of them in each stool. I stood in the middle of them,

turning slowly around. There were twelve stools, not quite as regularly spaced as the hours on

a clock face. They mark time not by hours, but by centuries.

Every 20 years, the trunks that grew up from these stools were cut back to near the ground, then allowed to grow again.

This living ring is more than three times the diameter of each face of Big Ben.

Where I stood at its center was once the solitary trunk from which this tree had begun.

With each cut, the stem sprouted back from the stump on the margins of the previous trunk,

so over centuries they made a widening fairy ring that genetically was still a single

tree. The year before my visit, they had harvested more than 100 long straight trunks from the

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