Trees are your best antiques.

The line treats living trees as a truer, nobler kind of “antique” than the collectible objects people prize for their age. It suggests that the most valuable witnesses of time are not curated artifacts but enduring parts of the natural world—organisms that accumulate history organically, season by season. Read this way, the remark is both aesthetic and ethical: it elevates the beauty of age in nature and gently critiques acquisitive nostalgia, implying that reverence for the past should include stewardship of what has survived it. The aphorism also plays on the contrast between dead, owned antiques and living, shared trees whose value lies in continued growth.