Beloved Book of Trees
(Warning, this post contains a lot of exclamation points.)
Okay. It is time to tell you about another piece of art that I really love.
Ta Da!
This wonderful book (Trees A Visual Guide by Tony Rodd and Jennifer Stackhouse) is an example of a niche art-form I will call Coffee Table Reference Books. One might be tempted to label it as simply a Coffee Table book considering that it has such beautiful, glossy photos and such beautiful commitment to showing them off to advantage.
But, this book takes the Reference Book half of its nature actually really seriously, and proves that you really can have both an escapist feast for the eyes and a super-interesting text that will teach you new things.
In fact, large portions of the book are actually structured more like a field guide, and as a result, I can’t actually say that I’ve read the whole thing, cover to cover.
But this is actually one of the things that makes this book so wonderful! You can open it to pretty much any random page and find something beautiful and interesting and encapsulated.
Or, you can go through and read a whole chapter and get something wonderfully coherent and enlightening, or perhaps just really good food for thought. Just like novels are great because you can disappear into another world, this book pulls you in with pictures and holds you there with words (but doesn’t demand you stay for the entire length of a novel).
Partly, of course, I love this book because it’s a perfect line-up of several different things I love. I love trees and forests. I love nifty facts. I love beauty. I really love things that are exotic and unfamiliar, and this book is pretty happy to lean-in on that sort of thing, too.
(It’s also happy to go with cozy and familiar for those who are more drawn to cozy and familiar – I think the authors were basically brilliant.)
Now, as much as I love this whole book, I must confess that there is one chapter in particular that really clinched it as one of my very top favorite Non-Fiction books. The chapter is called Communities of life, and at the start of it is this awesome map:
It is difficult to express how much I love this map, but the easiest explanation is just to go back to my previous statement: I love forests! One thing I love about forests is that they’re not all the same, and this map points out several awesome things – several awesome revelations! – about just that.
(Also, this chapter contains this spread, which makes me want to just disappear into that forest right now!)
So. Awesome revelation 1 – Did you know there are forests in the southern hemisphere that are fundamentally unlike forests in the northern hemisphere (and, as pictured above, apparently they’re gorgeous)? It’s like knowing there’s a fantasy land that I really could actually travel to! (and this is a big reason why Tasmania is on my list of places I want to visit some day.)
Awesome revelation 2 – Tropical dry deciduous forests. This book might actually be the second place I heard about this as a thing, but I feel like this is a secret they keep from non-tropical school kids. Deciduous-ness doesn’t mean no leaves in the winter. It means no leaves in a season when it’s appropriate not to have them. (I know, you all think this is super obvious. But my brain thinks it is fascinating and awesome!)
(Also, that’s apparently the sort of forest Madagascar has, and I’ve always wanted to visit Madagascar – yes, a tour of the world focused only on different forests would make me insanely happy.)
Awesome revelation 3 – Look at that map again.
This map explains something that has been bothering me for decades! Why are all fantasy novels (that are set in forests) set in the same type of forest, which is, furthermore, a type of forest that is pretty foreign and weird to me, a child of Montana – like it’s a made-up type of forest?
It’s sort of like how Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings made-up this blueprint (hush about sagas) for what a fantasy novel is supposed to be, and for a long time lots of people (not all, I know) followed that (made-up) blue print without questioning it or playing with it very much. So, just like that, to me, it feels like back in the time of people telling fairy tales, someone made up an imaginary type of forest* that all fairy tales (and fantasy novels) should be set in, and everyone just went along with this (made-up) setting without playing with it or questioning it. In fact, I’ve seen writer forums where someone says, ‘You can’t have ____ happen in a forest, that’s not what they’re like,’ and I scratch my head because I know real, actual forests where ____ happens no problem.
But that map explains it! I’m from the West (of the continental U.S.), and look, the western continental U.S. is comprised of a totally different forest type than most of Europe, the eastern U.S., and even a hefty chunk of China, which are all of a matching forest type. And that matching forest type matches the ‘made-up’ fantasy-land forests!
Forest-wise, I grew up in a totally different reality than most of the writers of western literature!
Anyway, I really, really love this book, even though I haven’t actually read it all the way through, cover-to-cover. Every time I take it down and open it, it makes me happy in a deep, fundamental way. I hope you all have books that you love just as well!
Happy Reading!
* Footnote: For some reason my brain links these fairytale forests to ‘Hanzel and Gretel’ very specifically, and otherwise calls them ‘witchy woods’, also to be found (very specifically) in the Tim Burton film, Sleepy Hollow.