The idea that planting trees could have a social or political significance appears to have been invented by the English, though it has since spread widely. According to Keith Thomas’s history Man and the Natural World, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aristocrats began planting hardwood trees, usually in lines, to declare the extent of their property and the permanence of their claim to it. “What can be more pleasant,” the editor of a magazine for gentlemen asked his readers, “than to have the bounds and limits of your own property preserved and continued from age to age by the testimony of such living and growing witnesses?” Planting trees had the additional advantage of being regarded as a patriotic act, for the Crown had declared a severe shortage of the hardwood on which the Royal Navy depended.
* aristocrat: 귀족 ** patriotic: 애국적인