“Teach me how to walk…how to pass lightly as butterflies,” Filipina-Canberra poet and novelist Merlinda Bobis wrote in her 2023 Hymn to Trees as an incantation.

Now in her latest book, In the Name of the Trees, the much-awarded Canberra author places her trust in trees and their close relationship with humankind.

Published by Spinifex Press in October, it is part of a planned trilogy, the second after The Kindness of Birds.

When I meet her over lunch, she tells me her plan is for a third novel, dedicated to the world of fish.

Bobis, already well known to Canberra readers as winner of both the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and the Philippine National Book Award in 2016, was this year named one of the top 10 female novelists shaping the literary scene in southeast Asia.

In this new novel, dedicated to “hardwood women, tough, brave, flawed,” trees and human beings are inextricably interwoven.

The Dao (Dracontomelon dao, Pacific walnut) gives its name to an 11-year-old schoolgirl; her mum, Pili, is named after the Pili tree (Canarium ovatum); and Lola (meaning grandmother) Narra is named after Pterocarpus indicus, the national tree of the Philippines. All are Philippine hardwoods, their names learned by young Dao as she grew up.

In the distant past, there is also Lola Banaba, the healer from Spanish colonial times who knows how to treat diabetes with leaves from the Banaba tree (Lagerstroemia speciosa, the giant crepe myrtle). Trees give their names to the chapters in the story, which spans four generations of women enduring war, colonisation and displacement.

Bobis has a keen eye for the botanical world, even in this “far country”, Australia, where some of her characters settle in a renovated Canberra ex-govie.

Returning for deep research to her homeland in Bicol, Luzon, she immersed herself in the forest and describes climbing inside the magical Great Dao Tree, more than 100 years old, whose roots form a cave where one can hide and whose bark is “like flesh, reptilian”.

Throughout the book, the chapters – mostly named after trees – include Narra, Sweetgum, Dao, Gundhay, Pili, Garal, Banaba. And the ubiquitous “no-tree”, the coconut. “The coconut is no tree. It’s a monocotyledon,” as Dao says.

“It was uncanny. I had a plan, but the stories were given to me by the trees,” Bobis says.

The work, though poetic in texture as she intersperses English with her native language, is definitely prose fiction, but also charts the complex history of the Philippines, from Spanish colonialism to the American and Japanese occupations, through to modern times. 

Especially, there’s President Corazon Aquino’s so-called “total war” against Communist forces in the 1980s – a policy that drove many Filipinas to flee to Australia after human rights atrocities.

The story focuses on Lola Narra, her clever daughter Pili, and her daughter Dao, and begins in autumn in Canberra, though Bobis is keen to avoid spoilers, hinting only at the narrative showing how Bikol residents took refuge in the hills and encountered Australians.

But the trees, too, have personalities, including the Silver Dollar Stringybark and the Golden Wattle, the national symbol of Australia, planted in the Canberra backyard by Dao’s father Federico when the family became Australians.

Bobis’ “hardwood women” embody the resilience of women worldwide. 

Like their namesake trees, they have special capacities for healing, seen when in a Philippine ritual of retrieval, Lola Narra tries to heal her granddaughter Dao, who was paralysed in an accident that killed her father.

“Stories heal, but stories can kill, too. They can be dangerous,” Bobis says enigmatically. You’ll have to read the novel to find out how.

In the Name of the Trees by Merlinda Bobis (Spinifex Press).