I stumbled on these pieces by Katie Holten on a cool new (to me) blog called BLDG BLOG which was recently about Holten’s About Trees. HOlten designed a typface, each letter represented by a tree species. From the blog’s author, Geoff Manaugh:Â
 It is essentially an edited compilation of texts about, yes, trees, but also about forests, landscapes of the anthropocene, unkempt wildness, altered ecosystems, and, more broadly speaking, the idea of nature itself. …
This has been put to good use, re-setting the existing texts using this new font—with the delightful effect of seeing the work of Jorge Luis Borges transcribed, in effect, into trees.
This has the awesome implication that someone could actually plant this: a typographic forestry of Borges translations. …
Given all the urban parks, hedge mazes, and scientifically accurate themed gardens of the world…surely there is room for a kind of translation landscape?
Stories and fables—koans, slogans, poems, wisecracks—planted as cryptoforests, literary labyrinths you could somehow, impossibly, read provided you know what each species is meant to signify.
I really, really love that idea. Orchards, not of fruit, but of words. Where a knowledge of specific and literal trees would guide you to more symbolic, metaphorical significance of those trees.
  There’s a last really lovely bit from Manaugh:Â
In fact, recall the myth of Odin discovering the Nordic runes: hanging upside-down from a tree and mistaking, in the especially complicated carpet of roots sprawled out beneath him, the beginnings of a new typeface, an arboreal symbol system that could be written down and shared with others. Runes came from roots—and, as Holten implies, every tree contains a library.
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