Many societies throughout the world have demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice forests in pursuit of economic development. However, there is a counter-trend in literature and environmental science—a focus on the possible and even likely sentience of trees, a notion that has the potential to inspire new appreciation for trees as organisms akin to ourselves and worthy of affection and protection. One of the earliest representations of tree-sentence in an effort to encourage forest conservation is John W. Jakes’s little-known science fiction story “The Dreaming Trees” (November 1950), published when the up-and-coming author (whose historical fiction later sold millions of copies) was only eighteen years old. In this lecture, I will discuss Jakes’s story alongside such contemporary works of arboreal and forest-management science as Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World (2015). I will situate my discussion in the context of an emerging sub-discipline known as arboreal ecocriticism, which was documented in the Spring 2022 special issue of Lagoonscapes: Venice Journal of Environmental Humanities.