11 Amazing Books About the Wonder of Trees

How does the history of trees mirror the history of the United States itself? From the once giant white pines of New England to the orange groves of California, Rutkow outlines how trees were essential to the early years of colonialism, and how trees are an essential part of our cultural and literal history. From colonists gathering under the Liberty Trees to plot rebellion, to the spread of Dutch Elm Disease, to the three billion trees planted under FDR, looking at trees helps us to look at the history of our country as a whole. While he could have been more diverse in his coverage of this history, Rutkow spans 400 years in this book that looks at our history from the perspective of the trees.

Starting in 1999, Julia Butterfly Hill lived in a thousand-year-old tree named Luna for 738 days to protect it against Pacific Lumber and the exploitative Maxxam Corporation. She wrote most of this memoir 18 stories off the ground. While much of the book is about her harrowing existence up there, she also writes powerfully about her connection to Luna, about the beauty of this tree, about the need to fight clear-cutting and the toxicity of greedy capitalist corporations. Hill is one of my heroines, and she writes powerfully in defense of all redwoods, brutally taking apart the industry of clear-cutting and writing a powerful love letter to Luna herself.

What do trees talk about? While this book can be somewhat dry, it paints a gorgeous picture of the tall, magnificent things that surround us every day. After reading this one, you might just never look at trees the same way again — it changes your focus, challenging our ideas of what it means for an organism to be sentient. Are trees really just scenery, or are they actors and communicators with agency and friendships? And given that they not only have this much ability, but also provide us with so much that we need to survive, shouldn’t we treat them with more respect?

This book is not specifically focused on trees, but it changed the way that I look at and interact with nature. Bringing together indigenous stories, wisdom, and history with the wondrous science of botany, Kimmerer encourages us to recalibrate and reorient our relationship with nature to one of reciprocity and mutualism. She writes about trees, among other plants and pieces of our natural world, to encourage us to see science as something of wonder that takes folklore and culture into account, that allows for passion, that allows us to open our hearts and minds to trees and what is all around us.

This book is a lyrical, illustrated volume in which Stafford writes about 17 common trees — from the ash to the cypress to olive, holly, and birch — and describes how they’re interlaced with human experience, history, and culture. She dives into how trees are described and personified in folklore, literature, poetry, and more, digging deep into how carefully these trees have been integrated and ingrained into our lives as symbols. This poetic book drips with Stafford’s passion for the trees, and her research adds authenticity to her analysis. It also explores the cultural impacts of tree loss, and shows the impact that these creatures have on our lives.

David Milarch decided that he needed to save the trees because angels told him he had to. He decided he had to do it by cloning the largest and toughest ones out there, but he didn’t know how, or if it was possible. Many experts and scientists informed him that it wasn’t. But decades after, Milarch and his team have cloned the sequoia and grown seedlings from the oldest tree in the world, a famous bristlecone pine. In this book, journalist Jim Robbins skillfully and in fantastic detail tells Milarch’s story and breaks down the science of what this team has managed to do. It blends the most intricate scientific research with the story and history of trees on our world, and with Milarch’s spiritual journey that powered him to make this breakthrough.

For more than 2 hundred million years, the gingko tree has remained stubbornly unchanged. Botanist Crane was first inspired to write this book thanks to the gingko in London’s Kew Gardens that has been standing since the 1760s — but this book goes way bigger than that, describing the gingko’s survival from the age of the dinosaurs to the way people love it today for its distinctive yellow fan-shaped leaves. Crane digs into its cultural, medicinal, and social significance to its powerful ability to survive, and how it might have been able to do so. The book is a love letter to the gingko tree, scientific yet accessible, and full of lovely illustrations.

One of the most crucial breakthroughs of the last few decades has been scientists’ adamant defense of the importance of old growth forests, from downed logs to the roots of ancient giants. In short, planting swaths of new trees in no way actually balances the impact of logging an established forest and its complex ecosystem, which is uniquely prepared for environmental disasters and biological diversity. In this book, science writer Luoma breaks all of that down, showing us in vivid detail how an old-growth forest operates as a single, complete, and infinitely complicated ecosystem, using a forest in the Pacific Northwest as the example.