LEGEND

If EVE tells ADAM that her tree has the ability to speak, ADAM would be more likely to find the anomalous tree more useful. He would be more likely to believe in it himself. He would be more likely to tell members of their community about it, and they, too, would be more likely to find it useful and worth believing in. Together ADAM and EVE might construct an entire mythology around the talking tree, along with accompanying rituals that spread to their group. These myths and rituals could then spread to other communities who might also find the idea of a talking tree to be useful and who might, as a consequence, adopt and adapt the concept to their own particular cultures.

                
   
Thus we have Greek historian Herodotus writing in the fifth century B.C.E. about the sacred forest of Dedona, whose trees spoke with human voices and had the gift of prophecy. Five hundred years later, the ancient Persian epic Shahnameh, or Book of Kings, tells of an encounter that took place between Alexander the Great and a talking tree that predicts Alexander's untimely death. Neither your mother, nor your family, nor the veiled women of your land will see your face again, the tree tells the young world conqueror.
Three hundred years after that, Marco Polo wrote of coming across the Tree of the Sun and Moon in India, which had two trunks, one that spoke in the daytime with a male voice, the other at night with the voice of a woman. In the book of Genesis, the biblical patriarch Abraham twice encounters his god at oracular trees, once near Nablus at the Oak of Moreh (Genesis 12:6), and again in Hebron at the Oaks of Mamre (Genesis 18:1). Throughout much if Europe, the concept of talking trees has for millennia been vital to Celtic and Druid spirituality, and it continues to be so among modern adherents of Druidry and neopaganism. There are even talking trees in The Wizard of Oz. And let us not forget the majestic Ents of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. Thus, a slightly anomalous yet exceedingly useful concept that arose at some point in the distant past is transformed into a successful and widely transmitted belief able to penetrate countless cultures and civilizations, even as it maintains its original essence.