Seeds get their energy from light, nutrients and water, without any of these the seed wouldn't survive.
There is a word for it but I can't remember it.

Seeds get their energy from light, nutrients and water, without any of these the seed wouldn't survive.
There is a word for it but I can't remember it.

So, some fun responses but we're not much further forward in terms of understanding.

Possibly I didn't really get my point across well enough.

Let me present the puzzle in a different form.

Suppose we got all the ladies here into a huge kitchen, and through the front door we kept delivering boxes of ingredients (flour, butter, meat, veg etc). I am confident that these ladies could pump out all manner of wonderful meat pies. For as long as I made ingredients available, they could make pies.

It's a simple process to understand. We supply a quantity of solid matter, and they transform that matter into something else.

You could think of this in many different ways. Provide an endless supply of bricks and you could build a huge house or tower. Provide tons of sand and it could be used to create lots of glass.

Now back to the tree. The "output" of the conversion process is a huge tree, made of lots of matter. But what is the material that feeds this process? How is all that matter made without tons of matter being fed into it?

As I said in the OP, there is not a huge hole in the ground so the tree isn't "eating" the earth beneath it. We are not converting soil into wood here. Something else has to be going on.

In the absence of any visible material going in, I have to conclude that the tree is creating MATTER from ENERGY. i.e. it is taking water and taking sunlight energy and somehow, quite miraculously, turning that into wood ! How on earth does it do that???!

There is, to my knowledge, only 1 animal that has a similar ability to create matter out of seemingly nothing. It is a type of crab, tho I don't remember which type.
This crab, like many crabs, periodically sheds it's shell and skin. It literally leaves an entire crab shaped shell behind with all its legs. It is then in a very vulnerable state for a while as it is completely soft at that point and predators could easily eat it.

But then the magic happens. It regrows another outer body. So a new shell, and all its limbs have hard shell again.
But the miracle is this. Scientists have put this crab in a water tank containing NOTHING but water. They have watched it shed its skin and regrow another and in that process the crab was given no food and it did not eat the discarded shell.

The conclusion again is that the crab has converted energy into matter. At some stage the human race will undoubtedly understand and harness this ability. When it does, everything will change because energy is abundant. It is all around us. We will want for nothing. Just like the Star Trek food replicators we will just manifest food to eat from freely available energy.

........or put it another way, the ground provides the water and chemicals dissolved in that water and the sunlight provides the energy, photosynthesis converts the chemicals into cellular matter and then you have a growing tree.