Living History

This article is concerned with how trees constitute senses of place and identity in England. It focuses on how the experiential and situated aspects of everyday practice contribute to the case for treating trees as actants in social life rather than simply as a metaphoric resource. Material gathered at Hatfield Forest in Essex is used to examine how trees become entangled in the making of identity, and notions of time and place among wardens, volunteers and visitors. Trees are found to be both latent containers waiting for the correct intervention andactive producers of meaning that structure human responses.