Short story about intelligent trees who control humans on an alien planet

Question

Years ago I read a short story in a SF magazine about a human colony on an alien planet. They lived a simple farming life and at the top of every hill around the village was a large tree. They did not realize that the trees were intelligent and were psychically controlling them- keeping them docile and farming the land.

Occasionally the trees would command them to fight each other and the trees would absorb their dead bodies into the soil, until a human child grew up and realized he was immune to their control and he decided to fight them.

Answer 1

I think the story in question is "Chlorophyll" by Stephen Tall, first published in the June 1976 edition of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The magazine can be read online at the Internet Archive here.

Some excerpts:

In view of the valley, all along its length, were high, round-topped hills. Atop each hill a single great green Being sat and grew, majestic and beautiful and ancient. Thus God was always with the people. He was always in view. He was jealous God, and he demanded obedience. To go to God was eventually, every man's fate. It was his ultimate ecstasy. It was his final glory.

From the time he was small, Sam had helped to prepare the gifts, the offerings, to the great green Beings on the hills. He knew full well that all the tools that he used in his work, the hoes and the rakes, the scythes and mattocks and chisels, all had made the pilgrimage up the nearest hill, that they might be blessed by the green God. And he knew that each blessing had cost lives. Men had later trudged up the hill, gathered the goods and implements blessed for use, and brought them soberly down.

"It is wrong," he would mutter. "It is wicked. And," he would add darkly, "one of these days I'll prove it!"