Models for parallel and concurrent processes lead quite naturally to the study of monoidal categories (Inform. Comput. 88 (2) (1990) 105). In particular a category Tree of trees, equipped with a non-symmetric tensor product, interpreted as a concatenation, seems to be very useful to represent (local) behavior of non-deterministic agents able to communicate (Enriched Categories for Local and Interaction Calculi, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 283, Springer, Berlin, 1987, pp. 57-70). The category Tree is also provided with a coproduct (corresponding to choice between behaviors) and the tensor product is only partially distributive w.r.t. it, in order to preserve non-determinism. Such a category can be properly defined as the category of the (finite) symmetric categories on a free monoid, when this free monoid is considered as a 2-category. The monoidal structure is inherited from the concatenation in the monoid. In this paper we prove that for every alphabet A, Tree(A), the category of finite A-labeled trees is equivalent to the free category which is generated by A and enjoys the afore-mentioned properties. The related category Beh(A), corresponding to global behaviors is also proven to be equivalent to the free category which is generated by A and enjoys a smaller set of properties. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.