The Trees Community was an Episcopal Church-affiliated Christian community and a music group. They were also known simply as The Trees, and originally as "The Symphony of Souls." They were at first a disparate set of unlikely young acquaintances that bonded in a sense of common brokenness that permeated young men and women in the United States at the time, and that resulted in a wide-ranging "search for Truth". From this simple beginning in a loft in Manhattan in 1970, the group evolved into a community with a formal, religious order. Based at The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in New York City, they worked closely with James Parks Morton who was Dean of the cathedral at the time they were artists in residence there. Canon Edward Nason West, upon whom novelist Madeleine L'Engle