Unbeknownst to you, perhaps, there is a major artwork of great acclaim to be seen in your garden, in your neighbor’s garden, down the street or in your local park. This artwork is very large, and it has great visual impact even from a distance: closer up, however, it affects all of one's senses.

Most miraculously, it also has fine artistic details when viewed close-up. This is no crude sculpture welded in an industrial workshop; every facet is complex, fascinating, well-proportioned, with pleasing arrangements of shapes and colors, at whatever level you view it. Even under the microscope, there are beautiful structures and substructures to be seen and relished.

OK, so you guessed, it's a tree. But this simple English word does not express the object's sophisticated looks or its nature: besides, trees are not stand-alone pieces of art, they are holobionts, integral to the life of many other beautiful creatures, critters and fungi that live upon, around and within them.

Exploring the detail of this wonderous artwork is breathtaking: the fine markings on pollen sacs, the micro-features of trichomes, the filigree hyphal network of a mycorrhizal fungus, the beautiful finish to a double-serrated leaf margin.

It's hard not to admire a tree as a work of art, but also, it turns out to be a giving organism, a habitat builder, a necessity for most life forms, including us. All these exquisite features are not grown for art's sake; they are all fully functioning facets that make a tree efficient and effective; being beautiful is just a side benefit.

Some people flippantly say that they could spend all day looking at a single painting or sculpture when, in fact, it is not that absorbing to the human mind. Such man-made works are, inevitably, too simplistic. However, there is a mind-blowing level of beauty and fine detail to the many features of a tree and its entourage of associated organisms. One could certainly spend many hours exploring a tree's intricacies, and yet it would still not be fully explored, even if just viewing it from the outside. You will find that every tree is an artwork of the finest quality, should you take the time to look.