Broadcast in late 2012, the first series of The Meaning Of Trees was a late-night midwinter treat, one of those hard-working and thought-provoking 15-minute programmes at which BBC Radio 3 excels.
Now it and its presenter Fiona Stafford are back for another hike through Britain's arboreal heritage, once again in The Essay slot (daily, 10.45pm).
Each night, a different tree - and kicking things off on Monday was the Scots Pine, one of the British mainland's few native species and revered the world over for its size, its scent and its all-round usefulness.
Stafford isn't an ecologist or a biologist or even a tree surgeon, and she doesn't have any particular environmental axe to grind.
On the contrary, she's actually a professor of literature at Oxford University. So while she was handy enough with the factoids - best among them were the pine forest's ability to create its own cloud cover; how pine cones can predict the weather; and the adjustment in pine tree DNA in Ukraine after the Chernobyl disaster - her real forte is placing her silent, living subjects in their cultural context and knitting it all together with a quite poetic turn of phrase.
The "peachy, patchy" trunks of Scots Pine trees make them look like "a gaggle of vast flamingos, dressed up in fur capes", she said enthusiastically in one particularly inspired passage, just before telling us that 17th-century writer, diarist and tree-nut John Evelyn had thought pine trees must have been planted by God.
On Tuesday it was the hawthorn and on Wednesday, Stafford was citing poets John Milton and William Blake as she stood under a metaphorical apple tree.
"The arboreal Alpha," she called
it, always there at the beginning of things and whispering of sex and love thanks to its "vibrant decolletage" and its sweet, rosy-cheeked fruits.
Thursday's tree was the poplar. From its trunk, matches are made and from its boughs - at least in Billie Holiday's iconic song Strange Fruit - hang the bodies of lynched black men.
On Friday, it was back to northern climes for a tree commemorated by Seamus Heaney as being "like a lipsticked girl" and by the Raasay-born Sorley MacLean as "the straight tender rowan". And did you know its bright red berries can treat piles? Sadly, Stafford didn't say how...
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