This is the British tree scientist’s debut scholarly comprehensive (and partly incomprehensible to me) work. In eight chapters she details how trees have shaped water, soil, fire, air, fungi, plants, animals and us over the long course of evolution.
She praises Suzanne Simard’s When The Forest Breathes, then harshly criticizes her Finding The Mother Tree, for anthroporphizing trees, although she does the same herself in numerous references to the hundreds of trees she discusses with their Latin names. I loved both of Simard’s books, which are less rambling, equally enlightening with respect to the interactions of trees and fungi, and more poetic.
There is much emphasis on the numerous aromatic compounds produced by trees to facilitate propagation and protect themselves, and a lot of detail about the evolution and genetics of trees, the details of which I would challenge any nonscientist to recall.
Although the writing tends to be choppy with some of it of questionable relationships to trees, there are also flashes of brilliance and she is perhaps unparalleled in her vast knowledge of trees.
For example: «Ripening time is nothing more than the tree equivalent of calling a taxi. »
3.5/5
Thanks, Al
Thanks, Al.
The Passionate Reader 