tree

tree a tree is sometimes taken as the type of height and strength. In poetic use, the word may refer to the cross on which Christ was crucified; the word may also be used for the gallows.

From Middle English, the word has also been used for a genealogical table or family tree, in which the original ancestor is seen as the root, and the various lines of descent as the branches.

The word is recorded from Old English (in form trēow, trēo), and comes from a Germanic variant of an Indo-European root shared by Greek doru ‘wood, spear’, drus ‘oak’.
as a tree falls, so shall it lie proverbial saying; mid 16th century, meaning that one should not change from one's long established practices and customs because of approaching death, although contextual use suggests the meaning that one should die and be buried where one has lived. The original allusion is biblical, to Ecclesiastes 11:3, ‘If the tree fall toward the South, or toward the North, in the place where the tree falleth, there let it lie.’
tree-hugger a (derogatory) term for an environmental campaigner, used in reference to the practice of embracing a tree in an attempt to prevent it from being felled.
the tree is known by its fruit proverbial saying, early 16th century, meaning that a person is judged by what they do and produce; originally with biblical allusion to Matthew 12:33, ‘The tree is known by his fruit.’
tree of knowledge in the Bible, the ‘tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ (Genesis 2:9) in the Garden of Eden, the fruit of which was forbidden to Adam and Eve, but which they ate as a result of the serpent's temptation of Eve.
tree of life in the Bible, a tree in the Garden of Eden whose fruit imparts eternal life; in Genesis 3:24, God judges that disobedient man must be expelled from Eden ‘lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever’.

The phrase tree of life is also used for an imaginary branching, tree-like structure representing the evolutionary divergence of all living creatures; in the Kabbalah, it is a diagram in the form of a tree bearing spheres, each of which represents a sephira.

See also the apple never falls far from the tree, bark up the wrong tree, you cannot shift an old tree, a woman, a dog, and a walnut tree.