Fear of Trees

What the dendrophobia entry says

The 2008 encyclopedia of phobias records it as fear of trees, and adds that the fear may be related to fear of forests or fear of landscape. That is the whole entry. No case, no figure, no history.

The neighbouring vocabulary is more precise than the case material warrants. A 2013 book on the oak notes three neighbours, all less well known:

• hylophobia, the fear of forests
• nyctohylophobia, the fear of dark wooded areas or forests at night
• xylophobia, the fear of wooden objects Four terms divide a subject that has produced almost no clinical writing.

Why the citations describe hostility

Wiktionary keeps a citations file for the word, and the collected quotations make an unusually clear pattern.

The earliest, from the Natural History Bulletin of the Siam Society in 1914, reads: dendrophobia, with which the pioneer is so strongly afflicted, seems to persist even in the minds of many engineers. That is a complaint about land clearance, and the affliction is the impulse to fell.

Robert Frost used it in New Hampshire in October 1923, of a man whose heart fails him at the moment of cutting. He drops the axe and runs for shelter quoting Matthew Arnold, and Frost says he had a special terror of the flux that showed itself in dendrophobia. The terror there is of change rather than of timber.

In 1999 Donald Rayfield, writing on Chekhov, calls it always the worst vice that Chekhov can attribute to a character, and finds it in Natasha's closing lines in Three Sisters, where she announces she will have the fir avenue chopped down and then the maple. Chekhov's tree imagery opens the play and Natasha's dendrophobia closes it.

In three of the four collected citations the word marks somebody who wants a tree gone. Only the fourth uses it for somebody frightened of one.

Why the fearful citation is wrong

That fourth citation, from an essay on trees, fungi and humans published in a critical review in 2021, describes a nightmare in which giant trees pull their roots out of the earth and chase the dreamer out of the forest. The author reports learning afterwards that the dream had roots in an ancient phobia of trees called dendrophobia, a primordial terror linked to a sense that trees are more alive than people think, in which trees have a paradoxical mobility that lets them grab people with their roots or kill them by dropping branches deliberately.

The essay then calls dendrophobia an officially recognised mental illness that may in extreme cases lead to institutionalisation. No diagnostic manual carries the term, and the reference book that does gives it one line and no case. The claim is not supported by anything in the phobia literature.

It is a good illustration of how these words circulate. Many phobia lists on the internet are assembled from indiscriminate sources that copy each other, and a number of sites fit a single block of standard text to any phobia name, changing only the word, which is content spamming aimed at search engines. A term with a Greek shape and a dictionary definition acquires a clinical reputation it never earned.

How old the objection is

The habit of naming fears in Greek was being mocked while it was still new. An article in the American Journal of Psychology in 1897 objected to the absurd tendency to give Greek names to objects feared, which, as it noted, would give terms such as klopsophobia, the fear of thieves, and one for the fear of the number thirteen.

Dendrophobia survived that objection by being useful to writers rather than to clinicians. What it names in Frost, in Chekhov and in the Siam bulletin is a stance towards trees, and it turns out to be a stance worth having a word for.