http://www.dailygood.org/more.php?n=8353

WITHIN INDIA, much of the religious and cultural recognition of the divinity of trees pertains to trees’ relationship to women. “The tree-woman relationship dominates Indian myth,” writes Kapila Vatsyayan, a leading cultural scholar of India. “The most functionally meaningful and inspirer of countless myths and the richest treasure of Indian sculptural motif is the Vrishkika, also called by other names—Yakshi, Sursundari and many others. They stand against trees, embrace them and thus become an aspect of the tree articulating the interpretation of the plant and the human. The tree is dependent upon the woman for its fertility as is the woman on the tree.”2

The feminine is often at the center of sacred groves. In her book Belief, Bounty, and Beauty: Rituals Around Sacred Trees in India, Albertina Nugteren writes:

The deity or deities worshipped [in a sacred grove] may be male or female, but female deities appear to be in the majority, being local representatives of wood spirits, earth-mothers, clan-mothers, fertility goddesses, and snake-deities. [Others have made] an explicit connection between the goddesses of the sacred groves and the Vedic goddess Āraṇyanī, the lady of the forest who is praised as the mother of all beings … She is often seen as some form of Bhagavatī or Bhadrakālī, known by such names as Amma(n), Mariamman, Devi, Durga, Sitala, and Gauri.3