arboreal

Etymology

From Latin arboreus (“tree-like”) + -al, mid-17th century.

adj

1. Of, relating to, or resembling a tree.
   1650, Walter Charleton (translator), “Of the Magnetick Cure of Wounds” in A Ternary of Paradoxes, by Jan Baptist van Helmont, London: William Lee, p. 72, High and sacred, in good troth, is the power of the microcosmical spirit, which without any arboreal trunck produceth a true Cherry:
   The sleek Brazilian jaguar Does not in its arboreal gloom Distil so rank a feline smell As Grishkin in a drawing-room. 1919, T. S. Eliot, “Whispers of Immortality”, in Selected Poems, Penguin, published 1948
   In the mild breezes of the west and of the east lofty trees wave in different directions their first class foliage, the wafty sycamore, the Lebanonian cedar, the exalted planetree, the eugenic eucalyptus and other ornaments of the arboreal world with which that region is thoroughly well supplied. 1922, James Joyce, Ulysses, London: The Egoist Press, page 282
   Only short blocks away traffic flowed turbulently on Flatbush Avenue […] but here the arboreal green and the pollen-hazy light, the infrequent trucks and cars, the casual pace of the few strollers at the park’s border all created the effect of an outlying area in a modest Southern city […] 1979, William Styron, chapter 2, in Sophie’s Choice, New York: Random House, page 37
2. Living in or among trees.
   1872, Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, London: Odhams Press, 6th edition, Chapter 7, p. 233, If the harvest mouse had been more strictly arboreal, it would perhaps have had its tail rendered structurally prehensile, as is the case with some members of the same order.
   […] faced with this emergency, Tessie took Chapter Eleven and me up to the attic. Maybe it was a vestige of our arboreal past; we wanted to climb up and out of danger. 2002, Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Book 3, p. 239
3. Covered or filled with trees.
   The breadth of the arboreal landscape requires a longer list of living creatures, and creatures of greater bulk. 1885, Richard Jefferies, “Forest”, in The Open Air,, London: Chatto and Windus, page 188
   She married him, and the two of them settled down in this quiet, arboreal part of Kensington: 1945, Elizabeth Bowen, “The Demon Lover”, in The Demon Lover and Other Stories,, London: Jonathan Cape, page 96
   mountains, unlike the arboreal garden and the sacred stream, had gone unmentioned in the account of Creation given in Genesis 1995, Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, New York: Knopf, Part 3, Chapter 7, p. 426

noun

1. Any tree-dwelling creature.
   So, by learning to use their eyes to more and more advantage the arboreals added another treasure to the foundation of human intelligence. 1971, Theo Lang, The difference between a man and a woman