Editorial Review

Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: The bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers’ genes far and wide. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a
similarly reciprocal relationship. He masterfully links four fundamental human desires—sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control—with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind’s most basic yearnings. And just as we’ve benefited from these plants, we have also done well by them. So who is really domesticating whom? ... Read more

Reviews

Some of the Most interesting Botany You'll Ever Read., June 13, 2001
Two different people sent me copies last week of Michael Pollan's book, The Botany of Desire. I'm a writer (Allergy-Free Gardening, from Ten Speed Press) myself and a lifetime horticulturist and I guess they figured I'd appreciate this book. They were right too. I found this book extremely hard to put down. Pollan is a writer first and a botanist second but he is remarkably observant about horticultural matters. He is also unusually talented at explaining complex ideas and he does so in a way that is fresh, fun, often funny, and suprisingly profound. Pollan's section on Johnny Appleseed alone is worth the price of the book. Here Johnny is a multi-dimensional character, one not just eccentric, but a shrewd fellow with great vision and considerable human frailty. The Botany of Desire is chiefly the history of the tulip, apples in America, cannabis, and the potato. This may not sound like the recipe for a really satisfying read, but in Michael Pollan's more than able hands, it certainly is. If you enjoy gardening, history, or just plain old very decent writing, I expect you too would appreciate this excellent book.

Plants and Humans Influence Each Other for Mutual Benefit!, May 22, 2001
"What existential difference is there between the human being's role in this (or any) garden and the bumblebees?" "Did I choose to plant these potatoes, or did the potato make me do it? With profound questions like these, Michael Pollan pollinates your mind with a new world view of our relationships with plants, one in which humans are not at the center. The book focuses on four primary examples of how plants provide benefits to humans that lead humans to benefit the plants (apples for sweetness, tulips for beauty, marijuana for intoxication, and the potato for control over nature's food supply). You will learn many new facts in the process that will fascinate you. The book's main value is that you will learn that we need to be more thoughtful in how we assist in the evolution of plant species.

The book builds on Darwin's original observations about how artificial evolution occurs (evolution directed by human efforts). So-called domesticated species thrive while the wild ones we admire often do not. Compare dogs to wolves as an example. Mr. Pollan challenges the mental separation we make between wild and domesticated species successfully in the book.

The apple section was my favorite. You will learn that John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed) was a rather odd fellow who was actually in the business of raising and selling apple trees. He planted a few seeds at the homes where he stayed overnight on his travels. Mr. Chapman had apple tree nurseries all over Ohio and Indiana, which he started 2-3 years before he expected an influx of settlers. Homesteading laws required these settlers to plant 50 apple or pears trees in order to take title to the land. And these apples were for making hard apple cider, not eating apples. He was the "American Dionysus" in Mr. Pollan's view. Apple trees need to be grafted to make good eating apples. Chapman's trees produced many genetic variations, which are good for the species. Apple trees became more narrow in their genes after other sources for alcohol and sweetness became available (from cane sugar). Now, the ancient genes of apple trees are being kept in living form from Kazakhstan, before they are lost due to economic development.

Tulips were the source of the famous Tulipmania in Holland. Rare colors occurred due to viruses. Those became extremely valuable during the tulip boom market in the 17th century. Now, growers try to keep the viruses out and we have much more dull, consistent species. We have probably lost much beauty in favor of order in the process.

The intoxicants in marijuana are probably caused by toxins that the plants make to kill off insects. Because the plant is a weed, it grows very rapidly. There is a hilarious story about the author's experiences in growing two plants that you will love. As the antidrug war progressed, marijuana became a hothouse plant and was bred and developed to grow much more rapidly under humid, high-light conditions indoors. You will read about modern commercial farms in Holland.

The potato story is the most complex. The Irish potato famine related to monoculture. The Incas had always planted a variety of potatoes to avoid the risk of disease. Now, biotechnology has added an insecticide to the leaves of potato plants, taking monoculture one step further. Interestingly, the insects are already becoming resistant to the insecticide. Are we building a new risk to famine with this approach? How will genetically altered potatoes affect humans? Is having consistent french fries at fast food places enough of an incentive to take this risk? These are the kinds of questions raised by this chapter.

Mr. Pollan has described a "dance of human and plant desire that left neither the plants nor the people . . . unchanged."

His key point is that we should be sure to include strong biodiversity in our approaches. Nature can create more variation faster than fledgling biotechnology industry can. Time has proven that biodiversity has many advantages for humans while monoculture has usually proven to have at least one major drawback. In reality, we can probably have both.

If you are like me, you will find Mr. Pollan's personal experiences with the plants and his investigations of the historical figures to be fascinating. He is a good story teller, and a fine writer.

After you read this book, take a walk through a park or a garden and think about Mr. Pollan's argument. Then consider how these principles can be applied to help ideas change, improve, and grow in more valuable ways.

Look at life from many different perspectives . . . and live more intelligently and beneficially!

Fabulous...., November 6, 2002
Read this book and you may never eat a conventionally grown potato again. I know I won't. If I hadn't been a dedicated organic gardener for over 40 years, I would become one after reading THE BOTANY OF DESIRE. I find it incredibly puzzling that more people haven't bitten the organic bullet. I truly believe a diet of conventionally grown food can shorten your life and bring on all sorts of aches, pains, and illnesses you might not otherwise suffer. Organic gardening works and the stuff you grow is better for you. If you can't grow it, for goodness sakes, hustle on down to your closest Whole Foods store and buy it. Organic food may be more expensive than conventional foods, but in the long run you will save on medical bills.

Michael Pollen's book is simply the best set of gardening essays I've read in a long while, maybe ever. And that's saying a lot because I am a big fan of gardening books (I've reviewed over 100 of them for Amazon). I haven't read something so enjoyable since Henry Mitchell's columns and books. It's not often a book of garden essays can make you laugh (misadventures with Mary Jane), make you cry (one million Irish dead of starvation), make you angry (one million Irish dead), and make you smile (is there any tulip so lovely as `The Queen of the Night?'

Pollan covers four plants, Apples, Tulips, Marijuana, and Potatoes. His first chapter on apples, disabused me of all my notions about Johnny Appleseed. I had read Anna Pavord's book THE TULIP, so the tulip section of Pollan's book was the least interesting for me, although he added some interesting anecdotal information.

The best section of this book as far as I am concerned is the chapter on Marijuana. My husband is a substance abuse counselor and I recommended the chapter to him. It could have been titled, "Everything you ever wanted to know about Marijuana that they didn't tell you in medical school or criminology class." If you haven't yet decided the U.S. government officials who devised the war on drugs are nuts, read this chapter and you will become convinced. Drug war indeed!!! Didn't we learn anything with Al Capone??

The section on the potato plant is downright scary. Pollan's adventures with Monsanto are illuminating. Once again, the feds come out as the dumb bunnies. Or, maybe it's the elected officials and their appointees who won't let the EPA and USDA do it's job. The material on evolution in this section nicely complements Steve Jones' DARWIN'S GHOST. Monsanto is in the process of obtaining patents on natural substances and evolutionary processes that will affect the whole food chain-and the CEO says "trust me". Yeah, right.

Do yourself a favor, during the cold weather ahead. Curl up in an easy chair with a cup of tea and read this book. Whether you garden or not, you will love it.

Excellent book, January 15, 2002
This is an amazing book.
Author Pollan takes us on a journey through history, botany, and the human psyche through examination of four plants - the apple, tulip, marijuana, and potato.
Recurring themes through the book are how plants benefit from encouraging human attention, and the dangers of monoculture, especially how modern man has taken the diversity available in nature and severely limited that diversity, limiting the plants' ability to respond to environmental challenges.
Throughout the book he sprinkles tidbits of information on the plant described, and on the surrounding human culture. He reveals, for instance, that the apple was not only one of the only sources of sweetness in early America, but that the main use of apples in early America was cider. Because we have so limited the original diversity of the apple into just a few strains, apples require large amounts of artificially-applied pesticide to fight the continually-adapting apple pests.
He explains not only how the tulip mania in Holland rose and fell, but why the prized feathered or "broken" tulips were less hardy.
In the discussion on marijuana, Pollan diverges into interesting discussions of the chemistry of human consciousness, how psychoactive plants interact with our consciousness, society's reaction to the use of marijuana, and how strengthened prohibitions against marijuana have ironically led to more potent marijuana.
Talking about the potato, Pollard discusses the dangers of genetically engineered plants - bringing in a pesticide gene from a bacteria to the potato, which results in not only biological dangers, but the danger of putting big business in tight control of agriculture. Pollard also discusses not only how the Irish potato blight came to be, but why it particularly impacted the Irish.
Woven through all these discussions is the theme of the split human attitude toward nature - admiring its wildness, while attempting to exert maximum control over it.

You'll enjoy this book - as you will a similar book (though less esoteric) - _An Empire of Plants: People and Plants that Changed the World_ by Toby and Will Musgrave, which explores the worlds of tobacco, sugar cane, cotton, tea, poppies, quinine and rubber.

Soft-spoken, but packs a punch, September 22, 2001
Pollan makes the rather striking point in the Introduction that we and our domesticated plants are involved in a coevolutionary relationship. We use them and they in turn use us. The bumblebee thinks that he is the "subject in the garden and the bloom he's plundering for its drop of nectar" is the object. "But we know that this is just a failure of his imagination. The truth of the matter is that the flower has cleverly manipulated the bee into hauling its pollen from blossom to blossom." (p. xiv)

And so it is with us. There is no subject and no object. The grammar is all wrong. We plant and disperse the apple, thinking we act from our volition, yet from the apple's point of view, it has enticed us through its bribe of sweetness to further its propagation. It has played upon our desire. The same can be said of every other plant "domesticated" by humans. As Pollan points out, from a larger point of view our farms and gardens are just another part of the "wild" environment. And we, too, are part of that environment--increasingly a most significant part. The plants, and of course the cows, the ants, the roaches, the dogs and the cats, adjust to the environment, or they don't. The ones that do will flourish. Those that don't, the mighty oak, perhaps, the hard wood trees of equatorial jungles, the tigers and the condor, that cannot, will go the way of the dodo.

This idea is not original with Pollan, of course, but nowhere have I seen it presented so convincingly. In a sense we are not the doer, we are the done. Pollan illustrates his thesis in four chapters on the apple, the tulip, cannabis, and the potato.

In the chapter on tulips and the tulip mania we learn that we are probably hard-wired to love flowers. Why? Because "the presence of flowers...is a reliable predictor of future food." (p. 68) We love what is good for us. We find beauty in that which nourishes. Pollan adds that "recognizing and recalling flowers helps a forager get to the fruit [that is to come] first." (p. 68) I might add that our love for little animals is both in their resemblance to our children and (hidden from our consciousness) their potential nutritional value in a time of famine. One might watch on PBS's Nature series to see how lovingly the big cat doth lick its prey.

In the chapter on marijuana Pollan admits to growing the noxious weed in his garden among the potatoes andthe tulips, but incurs paranoia since such horticulture is against the law. He points with restraint to the absurdity of the anti-marijuana laws, to the unconstitutional seizure of property by the marijuana police, etc., but one senses that he's pulling his punches. Or perhaps he feels that something is gained by using a quiet voice. He goes to Amsterdam and finds out just how potent the new marijuana has become. He views an indoor marijuana grow room and sees how sinsemilla is produced while noting that cannabis has become America's number one cash crop. (p. 130). He also notes that "the rapid emergence of a domestic marijuana industry represents a triumph of protectionism" (p. 131). Yes, Virginia, the drug war is artificially supporting the high price of marijuana and protecting domestic "farmers" from foreign competition.

The chapter on the apple concentrates on the life and career of John Chapman, AKA Johnny Appleseed, in which Pollan transforms the Disney-ish Christianized American folk hero into "the American Dionysus." The reason? The apple seeds that Chapman dispersed grew not into Red Delicious apples or Macintoshes but into scrawny little things, mostly too bitter to eat that were made into hard cider, which contained about three percent alcohol, the drink of default for the pioneers. They loved him for it, and occasionally there did indeed grow out of the cider orchards a tree or two that brought forth fruit that could be eaten with pleasure, and made into pies and butter....

The final chapter on the potato has Pollan planting Monsanto's genetically engineered NewLeaf potato, a potato that produces its own insecticide as part of the potato itself by using a gene borrowed from a common bacterium found in the soil. Pollan weighs the significance of this while recalling the history of the potato from its origins in the Andes through its economic effect on Europe, and especially Ireland, to its status today. He comes out strongly against monoculture and in favor of biodiversity. He reports on Monsanto's infamous "Terminator" technology, genetic alteration of plants so that their seeds are sterile, requiring the farmer to become dependent upon Monsanto for seed, a technology that Monsanto "has forsworn" following "an international barrage of criticism." (p. 233)

This a very pretty book written in an understated style about how we deceive ourselves, how we fail to see the world as it really is; how we see the world from a singular and restricted point of view, we as subject and actor, the rest of the environment as acted upon, when in truth, we are just part of the larger ecology, part of the process. We are creatures that kid ourselves to make more palpable our morally ambiguous behavior.

My favorite insight of many in the book comes from page 247 where Pollan, in recalling the brilliant time-lapse photography from David Attenborough's PBS series, "The Private Life of Plants," observes, "...our sense of plants as passive objects is a failure of imagination, rooted in the fact that plants occupy what amounts to a different dimension."

Through a Potato's Eyes, July 21, 2002
Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire is a collection of four essays on four different plants, each representing a desire that humans have: apples (sweetness), tulips (beauty), marijuana (intoxication), and potatoes (control). Pollan's writing is clear and purposeful, full of the kind of rampant speculation that would get a real scientist in trouble (or labeled as a "pop scientist" as Carl Sagan was), but perfect for the gardener-turned-investigator that Pollan is. In high school, we learn that plots boil down to basic structures, one of them being human vs. nature. Pollan attempts to flip that and write a book that is nature vs. humans by focusing on how the plants benefit from the years of selection by humans. Although the book is obstensibly about the plants, Pollan introduces you to a number of people who provide both the assistance and the foils for his natural protagonists, like: Johnny Appleseed (a real figure) and Bill Jones (who is more interested in a St. Appleseed); Monsanto, their captive customers, and the off-the-grid organic farmer Mike Heath; Bryan R., a breeder and grower of marijuana in Amsterdam, who is both frightened and proud of his patch of [marijuana]; and Dr. Pauw, who owned all but one of the most desired tulips during the mania that hit Holland.

The style of the book resembles that of John McPhee, partly because of its four-essay structure, but also in the short, broken sections that flit back-and-forth in time, place and thought. Pollan, unlike McPhee, has a conclusion to draw from his subject, though, and that is the need to support biodiversity and his fear of monoculture--be it a natural one like the reliance on the "lumper" potato in Ireland that led to the Great Potato Famine or the artificial one of human culture, where people show a range of interest on many things, not just the tulip (or dot.com) of the moment. Reading between the lines, one can celebrate not only the wonder of nature but also fear the danger of hubris in thinking that we are separate from that nature, that we are not as changed by it as we change it. In these days of global warming and other environmental pressures, it's a lesson we would all do well to heed.

Conversational prose, brimming with allusions, March 30, 2002
I just finished this lovely little book,and would highly reccommend it. If nothing else, this book prepares one for many interesting conversations. I am now knowledgable about the true Johnny Appleseed, the tulip craze of Holland, the highly specialized marijuana culture, and new developments in the genetic engineering of potatoes. (To name a few!)
The fact that Pollan is not a scientist, but an avid gardener and researcher, among other things, should be considered an asset to the reader. He avoids esoteric scientific terminology, but the text remains sophisticated because his allusions prove huge amounts of research. Each part of the book, each "desire", has its own special charm. I would be hard pressed to choose a favorite. This book truly opens one's eyes to "a plant's-eye view of the world". Though by no means the be-all-end-all on this topic, it is a beautiful natural history.

Impossible to set down!, May 17, 2001
Michael Pollan has written a hugely entertaining and wonderfully informative book. He takes us on a wild ride through the garden, changing our perspective forever, alternating between historical tale, vivid description of life in the garden and witty aside. It's a breathtaking book, a sure classic.

I'm not lending my copy to anyone or I'll never get it back!!

A good, but questionable, effort, July 22, 2001
Pollan's The Botany of Desire is certainly a fascinating book, and I would say that it is also a valuable read, but not for its scientific accuracy or integrity. Firstly, the author is not a scientist but a journalist, and we all know that journalists tend to glorify and exaggerate. His argument itself is attractive in some ways but consistently equivocal and vague. Though skeptical throughout, I did enjoy this book for the author's fluid writing, good sense of humor, and solid attempts and evolutionary insight.

Pollan claims that that the plants we domesticate have evolved to please our senses and thus encourage us to grow them in vast amounts, in effect, helping them to propagate. At first, this is a very attractive idea, but with further thought it does not hold up. Are people and the plants they grow commercially really in an obligate mutualistic relationship? Well, yes, they are. Human society, particularly in industrially developed countries, has become dependent on domesticated crops. But I would argue that we have moulded these crops to our own ends; the influence of natural selection upon these crops' ancestors is not as significant as the artificial selection we exerted upon them. Yes, apple trees did first have to get our attention before we would start growing them voluntarily, but we have artificially selected the apples that you and I eat today. Those huge Granny Smiths and Red and Golden Delicious you see at the grocery are not wild type species in the least bit. They are as much a designed piece of technology as is a finely tuned engine, and the orchard in which they grow is not really different from a factory. These domesticated species would never have flourished in a primitive environment, and they are totally defenseless to pests and other threats without the aid of their inventors, us. What difference does this make? We are still producing large numbers of them; isn't that all that counts? Well, you could always say that we are propagating the apples, potatoes, cannabis, whatever, but we produce them on our terms, not theirs. We artificially select the characters we want, and then we clone them by vegetative methods. The plants were not and are not evolving to please us; they are being manipulated to please us. Think about all the seedless fruits we have developed and sustained (grapes, bananas, watermelon, pinneapple, just to name a few). This process is the equivalent of evolutionary castration, reducing these plants to nothing more than a toolbox of malleable biotic mechanisms. They are no longer independently evolving; we sustain them solely for our own benefit, and the genetic lines of the plants themselves are frozen in time.

Now that I have griped, I must say that this book is not without its benefits. I had not really thought about plants the way Pollan presents here, and I must thank him for opening my eyes in this respect. Although I don't agree with him, I derived great value in following his thought process about domesticated plants. For this reason, I would recommend this book to those who would like to debate an interesting evolutionary topic that is a nice twist on traditional perspective.

Plants Modify Humans, August 8, 2001
Michael Pollan likes bees, and mentions them frequently in _The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World_ (Random House). "A bumblebee would probably... regard himself as a subject in the garden and the bloom he's plundering for its drop of nectar as an object. But we know that this is just a failure of his imagination. The truth of the matter is that the flower has cleverly manipulated the bee into hauling its pollen from blossom to blossom." His thesis in his book is that plants have not manipulated just bees, but humans as well in the ten thousand years since agriculture started. If we have a success with a plant, it is just as true to say that the plant is having a success with us. We may have learned plenty, but the plants have learned as well: make a flashier flower, a tastier tuber and those humans will do just what you want. Pollan examines apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes and finds that we are serving them well.

Apples we grow for sweetness, and sweetness surrounds our image of Johnny Appleseed, but Pollan shows that this strange character was not delivering apple orchards to the pioneers as much as he was delivering the alcoholic beverage cider, and incidentally he was making preserves of wild apple trees. Tulips we grow for beauty, and it is a beauty that has driven people wild. Pollan reviews the story of the Tulipomania of seventeenth century Holland, and shows that by what Darwin called "artificial selection," humans chose tulips that looked fancier, and tulips got fancier in order to be chosen. Marijuana we grow for intoxication, and Pollan admires what has happened with it: "_This_ was what the best gardeners of my generation had been doing all these years: they had been underground, perfecting cannabis." The government has boosted the potency of marijuana by forcing growing inside, where even carbon dioxide can be forced into the plants. The strangest and most troubling of the four stories is the potato, which we grow as a staple crop. Pollan got hold of the New Leaf potato from Monsanto, genetically engineered to have a toxin throughout the plant that kills beetles. The problem is that the toxin is behaving differently from natural toxins. Bees take it in pollen to other plants, and we know that monarch butterflies die when they eat milkweed dusted with pollen with the toxin in it; will this happen in the field? Pollan's potatoes grow into fine specimens, needing less worry and care than his other potatoes, but they fail as a harvest; he can't make himself eat them.

Pollan is an avid gardener and writes about these plants, all of which he has himself raised at one time or other, with an enjoyable wit and clarity. There is plenty of science packed into his chapters, as well as amusing personal stories and cautionary tales. Most important, his lesson of how plants are not just objects for our manipulation but are linked in pushing us along as we push them provides a vital evolutionary lesson. ... Read more

Editorial Review

Reviews

Like a raging wildfire, August 25, 2009

Big country, big people, big problems: an epic American tale, September 6, 2009

Well written history of an important event, September 12, 2009

Two Stories, Much to Learn, Keeps You Longing for the Next Page!, October 11, 2009

Another Excellent Book from Timothy Egan, October 8, 2009

Amazingly educating and entertaining at the same time, August 29, 2009

Gifford Pinchot, January 23, 2010
Pinchot was a friend of my grandfather and inspired my father Arthur duBois to go to Yale Forestry School. "Big Burn brings to life his mystical personality and his relationship with Teddy Roosevelt. Beautifully written and and easy read. Arthur W. DuBois

A Fine History of a Major Turning Point in the History of Forestry in the U.S., October 11, 2009

"The forests wanted to burn", September 2, 2010

When President William McKinley died of gangrene after being shot in September 1901, Vice President Teddy Roosevelt had to make a middle-of-the-night dash for Washington from a remote spot deep in the Adirondacks. This was a fitting start for a presidency that established the conservation movement in U.S. politics and placed 230 million acres of land under Federal protection as national parks, preserves and forests.

In its first section, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America details Roosevelt's love of wild places and his relationship with Gifford Pinchot. Pinchot was a McKinley appointee in the Department of Agriculture, a Yale man from a wealthy family, among the first professionally educated foresters. Roosevelt and Pinchot had a vision of the American wilderness as a sacred trust belonging to all Americans. The country was being gobbled up by grazers, miners, and especially the timber industry. Homesteading, the great opportunity for settlers spreading west, was often a front for big business acquisitions; fortunes were being made by a few at the expense, Roosevelt believed, of Americans yet to be born. He was determined to protect our heritage for those future generations. Pinchot and Roosevelt both came from privileged backgrounds but enacted populist policies, often infuriating the wealthy industrialists who had their eyes on the great spaces.

Under Roosevelt's presidency Pinchot tried to manage the vast Federal forests on the pittance Congress allowed him, staffing the service with a corps of committed young foresters, most of them from the Yale forestry program. Pinchot did not believe in removing the Federal land from commercial use; his vision was to lease cutting rights and regulate heavily to preserve the health of the forests. His greatest hubris was in his attitude toward fire: he believed that an agile, adequately funded Forestry Service could control and effectively eliminate forest fires. As fires were started by lightning, by sparks from trains, and by the many other works of man, the foresters used trenching and back-burning to contain them. The forests aged and filled with combustible debris, and it was inevitable that one day it would burn and burn, and not be stopped.

It was just chance that led me to this book exactly one hundred years after the furious fire that burned vast forested sections of Washington, Montana and Idaho. This great fire destroyed three million acres of forest--parts of the Bitterroot, Clearwater, Coeur d'Alene, Lolo, St. Joe's forests, and gobbled up several towns. Author Timothy Egan devotes the second section of the book to a detailed play-by-play of the two-day inferno and the courageous foresters, army troops and woodsmen who fought to contain it. In August 1910 the woods were tinder dry, clogged with brush and dead trees, and wanting to burn. Several smaller fires were fanned together by high, dry winds and became a "kinetic engine" that burned until the wind stopped and rain fell.

The third section of the book covers the political demise of Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt's attempt to return to national politics with the Bull Moose Party in 1912, and the changing fortunes of the Forestry Service. Egan's somewhat dramatic title is to a certain extent substantiated by the change in forestry management policies, and now logging in the national forests is in decline because it's cheaper to farm trees and import them for construction than to log under forestry maintenance policies. There is mention of the modern acknowledgement that the forests MUST burn to some extent, to allow their renewal in the aftermath of fire.

I enjoyed this book very much but you can see that like Caesar's Gaul, it's divided sharply into three parts, and that gives it an uneven quality. The extreme detail in the first section, and particularly in the description of the two-day fire and its aftermath, leaves too little space for the arc of public policy in the last hundred years--it's a disaster novel set between bookends of serious history. Four stars; I listened to the ten-hour audio production from Audible, narrated by Robertson Dean.

Linda Bulger, 2010

An Extreme Burn, January 14, 2010
The Big Burn by Timothy Egan is probably the best non fiction book I have read yet. He starts a little slow because you must know the people and how the conservation movement started. The book builds in intensity with each chapter.It is the history of Teddy Roosevelt's fight to start the conservation movement. With John Muir and Gifford Pinchot they started the fight to preserve our land. National Parks and Forest Rangers to protect them was established. While many in this country did not see the need to protect our land, this trio fought and succeeded. While this fight was hard nothing could prepare Teddys group for what was about to happen.
What happened was the Big Burn. One of the largest, deadliest fires in history, these men stood their ground and fought it. It talks of certain Rangers and how they fought the fire and survived, or how mistakes led to their demise. The book is written in story form so it is easy to read. The characters come to life with Egan's descriptions of them.
In the three page chapter where the fire starts, I did not take a breath while reading! I felt as though I was in the fire. I could see it, feel the heat from it and fear it. It takes a great author to do that. I could'nt stop reading the book after the fire broke out. The acres and acres of destroyed land and the deaths of those that fought to protect it will be remembered because of this book.
Because of reading this book I have been interested in bio's of Gifford Pinchot and Teddy Roosevelt. If you want to read a great book...read this one. I guarantee you will enjoy it. You will laugh, cry and have feelings of dislike for and with people involved in the fire. I am grateful that we have these parks to visit and enjoy. I am even more greatful for the Rangers that protect them.
Read this book. It will change you. You will not be sorry. ... Read more

Editorial Review

A practical guide to all aspects of edible wild plants: finding and identifying them, their seasons of harvest, and their methods of collection and preparation. Each plant is discussed in great detail and accompanied by excellent color photographs. Includes an index, illustrated glossary, bibliography, and harvest calendar. The perfect guide for all experience levels. ... Read more

Editorial Review

A tree that sheds poison daggers; a glistening red seed that stops the heart; a shrub that causes paralysis; a vine that strangles; and a leaf that triggered a war. In Wicked Plants, Stewart takes on over two hundred of Mother Nature’s most appalling creations. It’s an A to Z of plants that kill, maim, intoxicate, and otherwise offend. You’ll learn which plants to avoid (like exploding shrubs), which plants make themselves exceedingly unwelcome (like the vine that ate the South), and which ones have been killing for centuries (like the weed that killed Abraham Lincoln's mother).

Menacing botanical illustrations and splendidly ghastly drawings create a fascinating portrait of the evildoers that may be lurking in your own backyard. Drawing on history, medicine, science, and legend, this compendium of bloodcurdling botany will entertain, alarm, and enlighten even the most intrepid gardeners and nature lovers.
... Read more

Editorial Review

Beautiful but fleeting in their charms, wildflowers paint landscapes with wide swaths of color and imbue the air with fragrance. Wildflowers features North America's most gorgeous blooms in a year of full-color photographs. A field of Bigleaf Lupine beneath velvety green hills. Blooming Saguaro cactus. A carpet of golden California Poppies. Yellow Brittlebush abloom in the desert. Every image is a delightful reminder of nature's artistry. The calendar is printed on stock with 30% postconsumer waste content and comes with a 2011 desk calendar easel.
... Read more

Editorial Review

More than 370 edible wild plants, plus 37 poisonous look-alikes, are described here, with 400 drawings and 78 color photographs showing precisely how to recognize each species. Also included are habitat descriptions, lists of plants by season, and preparation instructions for 22 different food uses. ... Read more

Editorial Review

The man who revolutionized the field guide to birds now brings his formidable skills of identification and illustration to the more than six hundred tree species of North America. Similar in size and format to The Sibley Guide to Birds, the layout for this guide is another triumph of logic and concision. Species are arranged taxonomically, not by features such as leaf shape (as in most other guides), which will enable the user to browse the images to find a match for an observed tree in the same way a birder uses the bird guide. And all pages will follow the same format, allowing the user to pinpoint particular information with ease. David Sibley s meticulous, exquisitely detailed paintings illustrate the cycles of annual and lifetime development, and reveal even the very subtle similarities and distinctions between like elements of different species: bark, leaves, needles, cones, flowers, fruit, twigs, and silhouettes. More than four hundred maps show the complete range, both natural and cultivated, for nearly all the species. Issues of conservation, preservation, and environmental health are addressed in authoritative essays. As innovative, comprehensive, and indispensable as The Sibley Guide to Birds, this new book will set the standard of excellence in field guides to trees. 1.05 inches tall x 6.47 inches long x 9.76 inches wide ... Read more

Reviews

Good first impression, but ..., October 13, 2009
As someone who spends much of my free time poking about in the natural environment, has been an avid birder for over 35 years, and has a graduate degree in botany (ecology and systematics), I have used most of the major field guides and many of the more technical floras for North America. My hope was that this guide would be equivalent in importance to Sibley's bird guides.
The first things I do with a new plant guide is test it against a flora I'm familiar with and see what sort of identification keys are used. I didn't notice any errors or exclusions for the trees of Michigan, but using a common ID problem for this area, looked at the comparison between white and red/green ash. Sibley notes that red/green ash may have hairy twigs, but doesn't make clear that they may also have smooth twigs, as does white ash. He also doesn't point out that growth habit is often a good clue for distinguishing red/green from white ash, nor does he mention that some authorities now split red/green into two species. This is the sort of thing that makes me doubt the book's usefulness if someone tries to use it in an unfamiliar flora.
The biggest problem with this book, and I consider it to be significant, is the lack of identification keys. Although Sibley includes extensive illustrations of compound and lobed leaves in the beginning of the book, what does one do with an unfamiliar tree with a simple leaf? The only option is to start flipping through the pages, and that is a method that will lead to many misidentifications. Useful keying systems have been developed that don't require extensive knowledge of botanical terminology (e.g., Newcomb's system). Also, a glossary, or given Sibley's artistic gift, an illustrated glossary would be very helpful.
There are some good things about this book. It is the only book I'm aware of that includes all (or nearly all) the native and naturalized trees, and many or most of the commonly planted ornamentals found in North America. It also includes a number of shrub species that rarely take tree form (in fact, its inclusiveness of ornamentals and shrubs seems a bit far reaching and inconsistent). The art work is good, but I don't think Sibley's style is nearly as effective for trees as it is for birds.
This is an attractive book that presents basically sound information, but it seems to fall somewhere between a useful identification guide and an aesthetic celebration of trees. With a little tweaking and some editorial review by some botanists with regional or taxonomic specialties, this could be an awesome book.

Finally a real field guide for trees, October 3, 2009
I was very excited when I found Sibley's field guide for trees. I was secretly wishing that Sibley would produce a field guide for trees with the same level of detail as his guide to birds so I had been holding out for a long time to buy a field guide for trees. Sibley's field guide, unlike others, actually shows full color illustrations of each part (young/old bark, buds, flowers and most importantly, like he did with the bird guide, a full review of the different forms of a leaf of every tree). In just a few minutes of thumbing through the book I was able to ID a couple of trees that have been vexing me. Like Sibley did with birds, he has produced the definitive field guide to trees.

A work of art, October 9, 2009
The artwork in this book puts me in mind of David More's work in The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Trees which covers trees grown in England and Europe. I remember wishing there was a book of that quality for North America. In August of this year (2009) I got my wish.

Sibley's guide is more portable than the aforementioned work. It's larger than the typical field guide but will fit into a backpack or can be left in the car.

What strikes me most about Sibley's guide is the illustrations of leaves and fruit. They are more lifelike than even photographs can be and they seem to jump off of the clear white paper. The text is brief but mentions fine points in identification that make it invaluable. The only fault I can find with the book is it should have more tree silhouettes. Even with that fault I find it the best overall guide with its clear and precise leaf and fruit illustrations.

A good guide, but not inclusive or thorough, November 29, 2009
This guide seems designed to sell rather than to be useful; to be looked at rather than used. It lacks some things that it really should have.

First, as pointed out by others, it needs some kind of key system for identification.

Most importantly, this book needs more than two or three sentences per tree. The distinguishing features listed are in many cases wholly insufficient to accurately and consistently identify the species. Sibley perhaps sees trees as being as simple to identify as birds; due to introgression, they are not. One or two features is not enough to go on. Often, very useful identification features are left out of his text. For example, in his description of rock elm, there is no mention of the growth form/tree shape, which is by far the most distinctive aspect of this tree, and the easiest way to identify it.

The selection of trees included is very odd indeed. While he says that "any plant species that is commonly over 30 feet tall with a trunk more than one foot thick is included in this guide," this is simply not true. Peachleaf willow, for example, grows to be more than three feet in diameter and seventy feet in height, but is oddly not included. While many questionable "trees" such as glossy buckthorn are included, others that average larger in size, such as black haw, are not. The blue elder of the mountain west is not discussed, even though it commonly grows in tree form and may stand 30 or more feet tall. While he excuses this erratic inclusion in the introduction by saying that "one could quibble endlessly over the definition of a tree," this seems like a cop-out. Other guides, like the old Outdoor Life guide by T. Elias, do not have this problem. A tree guide should at least cover the common and widespread species that regularly reach tree size, even if they are usually smaller; if it chooses to cover only some, there should be some logic or consistency in how this is done.

The three things that I have pointed out seem to have been left out to save space. This is probably the publisher's fault. I understand that many buyers want a small book, or a pocket guide. Less inclusive guides are made for them. People who want a thorough and inclusive tree guide need to realize that there are lots of trees and accept that such a guide will simply have to be physically large. The Sibley guide tries to be both small and thorough and simply fails. Another year of work and 150 more pages could make this book the best of its kind.

All that said, it's a good book. I was disappointed only because I expected it to be great. It is certainly better than its main competitors in this niche. I'd recommend, along with this, getting a more thorough guide that is specific to your region.

Not a field guide, October 28, 2009
This book is not suitable as a field guide, for two main reasons. First, the book is physically too large and heavy to be practical to carry around on long hikes. Second, there is no usable identification key for locating species. The paintings of leaves and trees are beautiful, but short of going page by page through large sections of the book, there is no way to quickly locate a particular tree. Compare this to the vastly superior decision tree and organization of the Peterson Field Guide to Trees and Shrubs, which lets you narrow your search to one or two candidate species in a matter of minutes by answering a series of yes/no questions about a leaf specimen. I wish Sibley had just donated his wonderful artwork to the Peterson series.

If You Buy 1 Field Guide to Trees, This Is It, November 12, 2009
This is an amazing book. It is not the most comprehensive guide, but covering more the most common half of tree species in North America, it would be quite unwieldy to tote around if Sibley were aiming at completeness. Sibley has arranged the trees by families, which is quite convenient for narrowing down what you are trying to identify. However, what makes this book such a fantastic companion is how he can pack the most relevant information, mainly in pictorial form, about each tree in a page or two. The illustrations of leaves (often both sides, some in fall colors), bark, twigs, seeds, nuts, acorns, flowers, etc. are geared to helping make a rapid identification. By using pictures, instead of lengthy descriptions, you can instantly compare the tree you are looking at to the species in the book. If you are interested about the trees in your back yard, the local park, or hiking through the forest, this guide can help you find out what you are looking at. Knowing the name, can then be the spring board to find out more our leafy friends.

Know your neighbors, November 1, 2009
As an Australian recently arrived in the USA, this book has been my savior. I pride myself on my knowledge of the Australian flora and fauna, and I was becoming increasingly frustrated by my ignorance of the trees that adorn my patch of Kentucky. I have looked at a lot of reference works on the American flora, but many are intended for the home library, not the backpack or glovebox, and those which are not are often too limited to provide anything other than a general idea of what one is looking at. "The Sibley Guide To Trees" bridges the gap.
I had not long been in this country when I bought "The Sibley Guide to Birds", which I use to confirm and expand on identifications I have made using my Falcon "The Easy Bird Guide: Eastern Region: A Quick Identification Guide for All Birders (Falcon Guide)". David Sibley's "Birds" set the standard for me and his "Guide To Trees" is of the same caliber.
Sibley provides enough initial detail to narrow the field when you're seeking to name a particular tree, but he limits the use of scientific terms only to those necessary to identification, always welcomed if you are turned off by references that appear too technical. Clear, annotated illustrations of flowers, fruit and leaves along with tree silhouettes and in some cases branch and twig details are great refinements - as are the illustrations of the fall colors displayed by some species, these could be the clincher in identifying members of large families.
A home-owner planning a native garden would also find this book a useful tool. Not only are average and maximum heights given, but the additional information will tell her how the garden might look throughout the year, leaf-color in fall, tree shape in winter and so on.
One small thing stopped me from giving this book 5 stars. I would like to see a symbol used to identify naturalized garden escapes and another for introduced species. Even so, I would rank "The Sibley Guide To Trees" at 4.5 stars if it were possible to do so.

Sibley guide to trees, December 14, 2009
Wow! I really like this book. It is easy to use and gives so much information to make it easier for a "newbie" like me to identify trees. The drawings are detailed with good descriptions. The quality of the book is great in every way.

The reason I like this book better than one on trees for my section of the country is that so many times I come across a tree that is "non-native" to my area and it is not listed in the other tree books. This book has native trees and common trees. I have found it very useful.

Ho Hum, November 12, 2009
I guess this would be useful if you needed a quick guide to identify every tree in the continental US. Descriptions are very skimpy and they often feature 2 or even 3 trees per page. For me, this book was a waste of money. If you're not planning to visit all 48 states you would be much better served by buying a good regional guide. I live in Maine and I find Trees of the Northern United States And Canada is much more useful as they devote 2 full pages to each tree.

Simple format, great illustrations, December 23, 2009
The Sibley Guide to Trees has a great format that has worked so well in wild life guide books, pertinent illustrations and well written descriptions. It even has a check list in the back like a birding book.

My only issue would be that the maps showing the range of the trees are very small and hard to use. But all in all, a great book that many people have picked up off my coffee table to browse. ... Read more

Editorial Review

A detailed guide to all aspects of using edible wild plants, from identifying and collecting through preparation. Covers 41 plants in-depth and the text is accompanied by multiple color photos. ... Read more

Reviews

It isn't slightly better than other books on the topic; it's in a whole different league., April 1, 2010
These are not good times to put out a book on edible wild plants. Unless you're Samuel Thayer.

When I reviewed Thayer's first book, The Foragers Harvest, I wrote that it is as good or better than anything available on the topic. It has since become the go-to book for students at the Jack Mountain Bushcraft School. His new book, Nature's Garden, builds upon the high standard set by The Foragers Harvest and establishes him as the leading authority and author on edible wild plants that has ever published. It isn't slightly better than other books on the topic; it's in a whole different league.

The meat of the book is made up of plant accounts. These are in-depth profiles of edible plants, full of photos of how to identify, harvest and use them. The author bases all of his work on personal experience, so there aren't the usual falsehoods handed down by authors of lesser works. Instead, you get what works, along with anecdotal stories of how the author got to know the individual plants and how he's used them in the past. His writing style is conversational, and while there is a description for each plant that includes botanical terminology, the author writes it so as to make it accessible to the non-botanist. The numerous photos contribute greatly to aid the neophyte in identifying the individual species. The Harvest And Preparation section for each plant is where the author's experience really shines. Whereas the Peterson's Field Guide To Edible Wild Plants will list "starchy root" or similar descriptive term after a plant, Thayer has several pages of highly descriptive how-to information. To use a specific example, most books on edible plants have a sentence or two on acorns. Nature's Garden has 50 pages.

Anyone who has read The Foragers Harvest would expect the Plant Accounts to be encyclopedic and accessible, full of great photos and useful information. On this point, they deliver. If the book contained just Plant Accounts it would still be a fantastic resource. But there's more to outdoor living and foraging than how-to, and in the first section of the book the author gives a snapshot into the mind of living with wild foods. With sections on getting started, the ethics of harvesting wild plants, conservation, personal experiences on a wild food diet and a harvest calendar, he provides those new to foraging a great jumping off point. In a section titled Some Thoughts On Wild Food, he offers useful advice such as don't make a wild plant fit the description in the book (which is a common pitfall), then expounds upon the myth of the instant expert. The last chapter of the section is titled "Poison Plant Fables", where he discusses the story of Christopher McCandless and how his demise in Alaska, chronicled in the book and movie Into The Wild, didn't occur as the famous author of his biography would have us believe. He didn't poison himself by eating the wrong plant. Rather, he starved to death. By pointing out the facts, though, he doesn't poke fun at McCandless like so many armchair survivalists like to do. Instead, he treats him with respect, saving his derision for the authors and movie producers for not telling the truth. The money quote from this section comes in a section titled "What Lessons About Wilderness Survival And Wild Food Can Be Drawn From The Story Of Chris McCandless?"

'In a short term survival situation, food is of minor importance. However, in long term survival or "living off the land", it is of paramount importance.'

Bushcraft continues to evolve for me away from skills and toward personal relationships with the land and people. While I've never met Samual Thayer, after reading this first section I feel that we're kindred spirits.

There isn't a better book on edible wild plants. Taken together with The Foragers Harvest, it is the last word on the topic in print. I don't think more can be learned from any book; to go beyond what Thayer has written, you have to be out there actively foraging.

A Must-Own!, April 8, 2010
Whether you're a newbie or an experienced forager, you'll find this book fascinating and a must-own. I have over 200 books on edible wild plants, and this is far and away the best ever published.

A visual and informative treat that is hard to put down, its 512 pages are well illustrated with 415 color photos. Sam brings us fresh insights on 41 new plants. ("New" because the first book in Sam's series, The Forager's Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants covered 32 other plants.) One of the great things about Sam's writing is that it is absolutely authentic, based on first-hand knowledge. For instance, every one of the 32 plants in TFH is one that Sam has eaten at least 50 times.

A second thing that distinguishes Sam's work from other authors is that Sam has a great curiosity. He doesn't hesitate to question edible wild plant claims made by other authors. He delves into research reports and studies, experiments on his own and keeps track of his findings like a scientist. His "Nature's Garden" account on acorns is 51 pages long, and contains information and a synthesis of material and insights that you'll not find anywhere else.

One of the plants included in NG is garlic mustard, which I had written off as an edible that wasn't to my liking. I've cooked and eaten the leaves, the flower buds, and the tuberous root. I've nibbled on the bitter, pungent seeds. In his chapter on garlic mustard, Sam writes that the young, succulent stalks, stripped of leaves before the plant blooms, are mild, sweet and juicy. He says that they are good in salads, snacked on raw, excellent boiled or steamed like asparagus, and that they add a nice flavor to soups. This may sound weird, but I can hardly wait for garlic mustard to come up again this spring, so I can try it!

Sam also has a chapter on autumn olive. He says that they are the berry of choice for making fruit leather. I agree wholeheartedly. He demonstrated how to make it several years ago, let me taste some, and I thought the fruit leather was awesome. Since then, I have made enough for my own use and have shared it with over 300 people in wild food presentations.

If you are concerned with how applicable this book might be to your part of the country, take a look at page 16 if allowed by Amazon. In the chart, Sam states a percentage of the plants covered that would be found for a given state or Canadian province or territory. Sam has done a masterful job of choosing the 41 plants, and comments in each plant's chapter on closely related species found in other North American locations. Only three states - Alaska, Hawaii, and Nevada - and two Canadian territories - Nunavat and Yukon - are below 50%. Even if I lived in one of them, I would still want to purchase this book for the insights that Sam delivers. Also, since I travel, it would allow me to pursue my hobby in other regions.

This book is definitely a must-own.

A professional-quality reference, April 12, 2010
Award-winning expert in wild foods Samuel Thayer presents his latest, up-to-date expert work in Nature's Garden: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants. Nature's Garden lives up to its title with extensive information on harvest seasons for wild plants, and detailed instructions for preparing gathered foodstuffs. More than 400 color photographs on high-quality paper illustrate this compendium, helping the viewer see the difference more acutely in look-alike plants. From black oak acorns to ligonberries to cow parsnip and more, Nature's Garden covers an immense diversity of edible plants - including some that require extensive preparation according to step-by-step instructions. A professional-quality reference, and an absolute "must-have" for anyone seriously contemplating "living off the land" for an extended period of time.

Sam Thayer continues to fill the void!!!, April 1, 2010
Thayer has compiled another outstanding edible wild plant book with 512 pages that essentially has the same format as his first book, The Forager's Harvest, which has 360 pages. Not only does Nature's Garden continue to fill the void but the author listened to criticisms about his first book and expanded the coverage for the entire U.S. and Canada by including widespread species and genus-groups. A tutorial on "Plant Identification and Safe Consumption" provides the step by step lesson for those unfamiliar with how to go about getting started. The author has a nice 20 page chapter on "Poisonous Plant Fables" in which he puts to rest the twisted and incorrect notion that Christopher McCandless died from eating a poisonous plant that was perpetuated by Jon Krakauer's book, Into the Wild. There are 42 plant account chapters that are applicable to well over 100 species of North American edible wild plants. Every plant account has the common name(s), scientific name(s), family scientific and common names, an introduction covering some thoughts and experiences of the author, description, range and habitat, harvest & preparation, while others may include sections on ecology, history and lore, individual genus or species accounts, comparative tables, a dichotomous key (Lettuce-Dandelion Group only), line drawing (lotus tubers only) and an abundance of excellent photos. There are 50 pages dedicated to a fan-freakin'-tastic section on how to collect, process and utilize acorns from oak trees. He has added some very useful comparative photographs of some commonly mixed up poisonous and edible plants. For example, he clearly shows how to differentiate between Poison Hemlock (C. maculatum) and Wild Carrot (D. carota). In comparison to his first book, it contains a bibliography that is 4 times the size and a similar but slightly expanded glossary which is also very useful, as well as a handy index. A visually stimulating book with informative, enthusiastic words from an experienced, practicing forager who continues to research and experiment with edible wild plants. Without question, this book must be in the hands of those who are just beginning through to the accomplished foragers. Sam: thanks for taking the time to assemble this fabulous book and for sharing your knowledge with the rest of us so we can more easily and confidently enjoy the bounty that nature provides!

Absolutely Excellent!!, May 18, 2010
I have about a dozen different books on edible wild plants in my library, and Samuel Thayer's books are by far my favorites. Where other authors attempt to give you a huge list of all of the edible plants in the United States, or a large area thereof, Sam has narrowed his focus to a much smaller number of plants that have significant food value. A brief glance at other wild edibles books will show that a large proportion of the plants listed in them are only suitable for use as a tea or salad green. Rarely do they make much distinction between what is simply edible and what actually tastes good, or give sufficiently detailed instructions for those plants which require special preparations. In contrast, Sam presents extensive, detailed instructions and photographs on identification, harvest, preparation, and storage of those plants which are not just edible, but also delicious, and that have sufficient caloric value to be capable of serving a meaningful role in the diet of a forager.

Like his first book, "The Forager's Harvest", "Nature's Garden" has a regional bias toward plants that are found in the Midwestern United States. However, he has selected plants that have a wide geographic distribution to make this volume useful over a larger area. About half of the species covered in the book occur in all of the lower 48 states.

I would recommend this book very highly to anyone who is interested in learning more about edible wild plants, no matter their experience level.

Outstanding, accessible and comprehensive, July 2, 2010
No matter how well you know your wild edibles, American forager Samuel Thayer can teach you something. His brand new how-to book, called "Nature's Garden: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting and Preparing Edible Wild Plants," is by far the best work on the subject, well worth the $25 cover price.

What sets "Nature's Garden" apart from other guide books is its incredible depth. Thayer is true to his subtitle as he tackles the intricacies of 42 common plants found across North America -- including dock, elderberry, oak, wild lettuce, amaranth, chickory and huckleberry -- over 512 glossy pages. Packed with outstanding full-color photos and helpful charts (for instance, on the characteristics of red vs. white acorns), the book is highly useful for beginning and advanced foragers alike. It is written in an accessible yet scholarly style that avoids jargon whenever possible.

Thayer's propensity for going the extra mile on the details makes this a total win for readers who really want to try this in the field. Lots of books might tell you, for instance, that young dock leaves taste better than older ones. But Thayer offers helpful tips like, "They do not have to be tiny, just young," and "As long as the sides are even slightly rolled up, the leaf will be tender. Often...you will find them very slimy. Don't worry: the slime is a sign that you are getting leaves at the right stage, and it will rinse off."

Though it's by and large a how-to, there is a narrative element as the author opens each chapter with a reflective personal anecdote about his experiences. These can be serious in tone, so I appreciated the occasional levity in the captions: Passifloracea, he writes, is "arguably the coolest-looking flower in the world." And the first 75 pages are an entertaining read as Thayer reveals his personal views on what really killed Christopher McCandless of "Into the Wild."

Thayer's first book, "The Forager's Harvest," was published in 2006 and has become a respected standard, covering 32 wild foods, from cattail to stinging nettle (the newest work does repeat a few, but not many). One of my favorite features is a handy calendar outlining the harvest times for various plant parts from March through November. Fortunately, the latest work does too.

Review originally appeared on FirstWays[dot]com

If I could only have one book on foraging, this would be it., April 30, 2010
I said the same thing about his first book. I hope I get to say it about his next book. I am going to automatically buy anything Samuel Thayer writes from now on. His refreshing "claimer" (as opposed to "disclaimer") was alone worth the purchase price. Mr. Thayer is as much a philosopher as a forager. He encourages us to participate in nature rather than just visiting it like tourists, and does so in a forthright manner that appeals greatly to me.

Wonderful!, September 24, 2010
Fairly new to the subject of wild edibles... I REALLY enjoy this book! Packed full with big beautiful, colorful, clear pictures and complete, easy to understand descriptions-- what a gem! A joy to read and very interesting. I also got the other book Forager's Harvest by Samuel Thayer, and I am glad I did. Very pleased! Both books are recommended to anyone with an interest in the subject, gardeners and farmers, teachers, naturalists, survival minded folk, pro-organic types...you name it!

Great guide to wild edibles, May 25, 2010
I like that he has first hand knowledge and has (it sounds like) dedicated his life to this topic. It is nice that he goes into depth on each plant and shows poisonous look-alike plants. I find this book to be well written; interesting to read; and useful for this topic. It is nice that he spends time discussing the myths about harvesting wild edibles. It helps to allay some of the fear and societal pressure against it.

Detailed Guide to a Variety of Plants, May 18, 2010
This book is deep into 5 star territory, right at or near the top. The author clearly combined a lot of research on edible plants along with a lot of personal experience. I have picked just a couple of the plants that are reviewed so far but they match the descriptions of the author exactly.

More than a book on gathering herbs, if you are open to it, this will change the way that you think about the natural world and early North American history. North American has edible plants all over as if it were the remains of wild/forest gardens tended to for thousands of years.

Great descriptions of both the plants to pick, whether similar plants are edible [that you might mistake a plant for along with detailed descriptions of poisonous plants you could mistake for edible ones. ... Read more

Editorial Review

Full-color illustrated guide to identifying 200 Western mushrooms by their key features. ... Read more

Reviews

Love of Mushrooms, August 16, 2004
I always appreciate reading something by a person who loves what they are writing about. It seems like all too often a book is written by someone who seems to know what they are talking about, but don't LOVE what they are talking about.

David Arora LOVES mushrooms! Not only that, he knows a LOT about them. This book is more than any other field guide I've owned. It allows for quick and easy identification of common mushrooms, which is important. However, it shows us the human side of the fungal world. Delicious recipes, stories of friends and funny anecdotes are sprinkled among hard facts. Colorful photos abound of both the mushrooms themselves, but also their happy finders. Old japanese men, young girls, cheerful bearded men and even a few happy dogs are all shown with glee at their find. Mushrooming is not something people do as a chore, its what they do as a passion.

The pleasure of finding something secret, something mysterious on the forest floor, something to fill you with earthen smells and primitive tastes. This pleasure practically drips from "All the Rain Promises and More..."

If you like mushrooms, or if you think maybe you WOULD like mushrooms, if you just got the right introduction, then this book is for you. If you already love mushrooms, then this book is a great pocket guide (nice pocket size, I carry mine all over), with clear photos, decisive identification criteria, and plenty of facts and interesting tidbits to make you nod knowingly, pleased at what you'll find after the fall rains.

Absolutely essential!, August 27, 2000
This is the book you must have if you are even casually interested in wild mushrooms. I am replacing a copy that some cretin stole from me. It is a reader's digest version of the big book by David Arora that is also indispensable. Great photographs and very good descriptions of the most commonly encountered species. A nice touch of humor to make it more than just a reference. Don't miss this one!

An EXCELLENT Guide! (Even if you don't live in the West.), May 1, 2004
I eagerly waited for this book to arrive to me because of all the rave reviews I read about it. Then when I found out it was a guide for WESTERN mushrooms (extending to Colorado; I live in the Midwest) I thought, Crap, I'm gonna half to return it. But the more I kept browsing through it, the more I wasn't going to return it. I LOVE this book! This is a good read even if you don't live in the area it covers. Some of a species described in the book I have actually found in my area.
The photography is excellent, and many times show different angles of the 'shroom. The descriptions are very clear and easy to understand and extra comments, stories and some cooking suggestions are included. However, this guide doesn't include all of the species; it's only made to be an easy-to-carry field guide. I would suggest a more in-depth guide as a compliment to this one. I've heard good things about Mushrooms Demystified (same author), and I am so impressed with this book that I am going to buy it as well.

Indispensable Field Guide, November 30, 1999
Absolutely the best pocket-sized reference around. I lost my copy (or it was stolen!) and am reordering another. Contains identification keys that are usable in the field (less dependence on spore prints and microscopic exams than some of the others). Great photos make field ID easy. It seems I nearly always find what I'm looking for in this little book. Don't leave home without it!

a little rain never hurt anyone, February 14, 2001
If anyone wants to learn about wild mushroom hunting/eating, this the best book one can get! After you read it, spend a little extra for mushrooms demystified. It's the answer to the answer.

Gettin' My Own Copy, August 13, 2004
I borrowed the book from a co-worker and have found it to be an invaluable and extremely handy and easy to use field reference guide. The information is excellent and the photos are just as helpful. The Quick Key in the front and back of the book help the Identification process go quicker. I am hooked and have to get my own copy now!! Great for beginners like me!

An excellent book! VERY enjoyable and informative!, September 28, 1999
Lots of wonderful little stories, great photos, and clear, concise descriptions. A must-have for anyone who enjoys nature and especially loves mushies. Look for the recipes throughout the book.

A must have mushroom identificaion guide, August 5, 1998
This book is GREAT! A fantastic field guide, giving great pictures, stories, recepies, and more. Even covers some of the psilocybin species. This book is aimed at mushrooms in the western U.S. so if your elsewhere it may not be helpfull, but most of these species do grow all over the world so I don't think it matters much. A great book!

Stellar book, April 22, 2003
Great on the coffee table, great in the field. This book is a whole lot more than the description suggests. Try and find Yellow Feet (a prolific edible in the west) in any other book.

Great reading for non-fungiphiles and shroomheads alike!, September 16, 1999
This guide is a gem, covering everything from recipies to cultural attitudes and blurbs of short fiction (intentionally or not, the stories are hilarious), all of which is sandwitched into an information packed, full color photo format replete with every prominant mushroom you want to identify. All fits in your pocket, too. ... Read more

Editorial Review

From well-loved oaks and pines to rare, spectacular species such as the snowbells of Japan, this lavishly illustrated work is an unparalleled guide to more than six hundred of the world's major forest and garden trees. An excellent resource for gardeners, botanists, and general readers alike, The World of Trees is a tribute to natural beauty by a superb prose stylist, an essential reference, and a practical guide for gardening. Hugh Johnson illuminates his subject in thorough and loving detail: the structure and life cycle of trees, how trees are named, trees and the weather, the use of trees in gardens and landscape design, and tree planting and care. The heart of the volume is a compendium of coniferous and deciduous trees grouped by family, describing and illustrating important species and varieties. It also includes a guide to choosing trees for the garden and an A-Z listing of the most important and popular species and varieties.
The World of Trees is a completely revised edition of Hugh Johnson's classic International Book of Trees featuring new photographs, systematic illustrations of all key tree parts, and current listings for the newest varieties and cultivars
... Read more

Editorial Review

Nothing is more elusive and mysterious than the wild mushroom.David Arora celebrates the gathering and study of wild mushrooms with engaging style, wit and simple terminology.Mushrooms Demystified includes descriptions, photographs, and keys to over 2,000 species.There is a Beginner's Checklist of the 70 most distinctive and common mushrooms plus detailed chapters on terminology, classification, habitats, mushroom cookery, mushroom toxins, and the meanings of scientific mushroom names. ... Read more

Reviews

The "Go To " Mushroom Guide, June 18, 2005
I own a lot of field guides for birds, insects, reptiles, wildflowers and on and on. If you are like me then you enjoy reading field guides like some people read novels. The usual field guides are just monotone dry descriptions and pictures. David Arora's book is apart from the rest. His descriptions are entertaining and witty and filled with good information. Just reading the descriptions is as entertaining as it gets for any book of any genre. The second edition is a door stopper of a book for size but there is very little if no fluff.
The first thing any botanical field guide should have is a good dichotomous key. Arora's book has a very good key. The photos are excellent and the color plates are spectacular. If you think you can identify a mushroom with just a photo then you are treading in dangerous waters. There are countless "Little Brown Mushrooms" that can hardly be distinguished by a photo. You need a key. The same mushroom can vary enormously depending on humidity and age of the specimen. One photo like in some other guides will hardly show all variations in a single mushroom. Photos are OK for other field guides describing birds or wildflowers but for mushrooms, a wrong choice could be life threatening. A photo of a Gomphus could look like a chanterelle. You will find yourself eating something more like cardboard instead of an epicurean delicacy. You could also think Omphalotus is a chanterelle based on a photo, making a deadly mistake. Arora's book will familiarize you with all the distinguishing characteristics that set the poisonous species apart from the edible. In spite of what I say about identifying mushrooms with photos , the black and white photos in the book do very well by showing the mushrooms in varying stages of maturity.
The book is also scientific by all standards. The species are listed in accepted phylogenetic order and not by color or size or other ambiguous sequences. Being scientific does not make it difficult for the amatuer though. Arora walks you through the identification process in a comprehensive and easy to follow manner for the most rank amatuer. This field guide should be only one among many if you are into mushrooms but will end up being your "go to" guide among the lot. For identifying fungi I reccommend "How to Identify Mushrooms to Genus V" Cultural and Developmental Features" by Roy Watling. For a good text about Fungi in general I reccommend "The Fifth Kingdom" by Bryce Kendrick.

Huge!! Comprehensive, but has a few faults., May 9, 2001
This book really gets into those fungi!! I got this book for my wife and I to use as our complete reference book on mushrooms. The book is a little intimidating because it gets so in-depth. And definitely lacks in good pictures. However, after reading a lot in this book you really start to learn a deeper side to those mysterious fungi. Great humor and candor mixed in throughout the book. The step by step ID section has been right-on in helping to identify mushrooms. There are quite a few I have been unable to identify if only I had a great picture of it! Some of the Step by step groups are so extensive its easy to get lost in them without ever finding your mushroom. By far the the most complete book on mushrooms I've seen but probably not for the total beginner. I will be looking for a companion to this one with more color pictures to help. Don't get me wrong, if you want to really get into mushrooms, or already are into them, this book is a must.

Nicely Done, July 1, 2005
This book is an essential desk-reference for mushroom enthusiasts. The extensive introduction includes articles on "fungophobia" (fear of eating wild mushrooms), mushroom biology, mushrooms and the environment, scientific names and classification, mushroom collecting, mushroom identification, directions on how to use keys, mushroom FAQs, LBMs (little brown mushrooms), habitats, and a list of 70 distinctive mushrooms. This material is followed by a general key to the major groups of mushrooms, and then over 800 pages of mushroom descriptions, organized according to the key, with additional specific keys for each major group. Brief articles are provided for each individual mushroom species, including scientific name, common names (if available), and descriptive information covering (where relevant) cap, gills, stalk, veil, spores, habitat and edibility. High quality black-and-white photographs are provided for many (though not all) species. There is also a section of color plates in the middle of the book referenced by name and page number to the articles in the text. End material includes articles on mushroom cookery, preservation, and toxins, a dictionary of scientific Latin relevant for mushroom study, a glossary, a bibliography, and an index. A metric/inch ruler is printed on the back cover as a useful measurement aid.

With its varied in-depth articles and large number of species covered, this book is a treasure-trove of information. It is not quite as visual as other large guides, since not all species have photos, and all the photos in the main text are black-and-white. This approach forces the user to rely on reading the details of the key, which is a very sound approach to identification. The first edition of the book was written solely about Californian mushrooms. In this edition, Arora has expanded his coverage to the continental United States, but he notes that many of his comments about habitat may be more relevant to California residents than others. The size and weight of the volume make it a bit unwieldy to carry into the field, but it makes a fine reference for study and identification once you've got the mushrooms back home.

A Must Buy for Every Mushroomer, April 12, 2000
From the beginner to the expert, this book contains enough information to keep both satisfied. It can even make the beginner feel like an expert after a while! It is entertaining, interesting and filled with information that is simply unavailable elsewhere. Often I find myself reading it for the sheer pleasure of learning about mushrooms. It is amazingly comprehensive for a book that is supposed to be from the west coast. I live in the east and I find it incredibly useful. Often other books are incomplete or vague in their descriptions and this one steps in to fill the gaps. If there is one flaw with this book it is the lack of pictures. Often I consult other books to match a mushroom to the picture and get an idea of what it might be. Then this book helps to narrow it down to an exact species and supplies more information than most other books combined. If you are interested in hunting mushrooms then I can see no reason why you should not own this book...END

Best field guide, September 22, 2000
This is probably the best field guide ever done on the subject. Although I was a neurobiology student in grad school, I had an interest in mycology and took every mycology, lichenology, and non-vascular plant course offered at San Francisco State by the great mycologist, Dr. Harry Thiers, so I've had instruction in the subject by the best. And although the academic specialists have done better books on the individual genera, this is still the best overall "nature guide" type book. Just the photographs themselves are worth the price of the book, because they're gorgeous. There is also plenty of information on other topics besides the description and identification material, such as how fungi reproduce, their distribution and ecology, edibility and toxicology, and many other interesting subjects.

The one criticism I've heard about the book from the professional mycologists is that Arora did not do microscopic analysis on his specimens so as to actually prove what species it is. If you approach the book from the standpoint of this being the best book on the art and science of mushroom identification based on macroscopically observable features, you will be fine. It is Arora's expertise in this aspect of mycology and the detailed and clear descriptions of the species for identification purposes that is exceptional about this guide.

An excellent guide for mushroomers at any level, October 4, 1999
This is one of my all time favorite mushroom guides. Aurora combines comprehensive info on mushrooms along with witty humor. The book contains detailed descriptions of a lot of different species, including microscopic details. This isn't the book for you if you want a lot of nice colored photos, but if you can use a dichotomous key you'll be all set!

the title says it all, February 23, 2006
Huge volume, very complete. For beginners through true mycophiles. As a companion I suggest the National Audubon Society Field Guide to Mushrooms. With these two books you could rule the world, or at least idetify most North American mushrooms. I highly value my copy.

The Greatest, August 9, 2002
Mushrooms Demystified is the most useful single book I know of on the subject. The dicotomous keys are a powerful identification tool, and the descriptions are right on target. From beginning concepts such as "What is a fungus?" to technical microscopic details, Mushrooms Demystified is accurate and easy to understand. Humor and wit round out the text which is wonderfully well written. It is not a picture book, but it does have enough pictures to make a positive identification. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in the intriguing kingdom of fungi. Im wearing out my second copy.

Don't pick without it!!, November 1, 2000
Not only is this book the most comprehensive and easiest to use guide on the market, it's necessary! *DO NOT* pick wild mushrooms to eat unless you own this book! As a mycologist of 25 years and gourmet cook, I relish wild mushroom dishes, but please: YOU CANNOT IDENTIFY MANY EDIBLE MUSHROOMS BY SIGHT ALONE! Spend the money to get this book and pick safely. I'm so glad it's finally fall, I'm going out to pick a basket of chantrelles for dinner! Yeay!!!!

actually good beginner book, October 13, 2006
I love this book.

I am a near total beginner. My previous experience was looking at chanterelles and king boletes with an experienced mushroomer.

My few lessons kept me grazing during a long wet packing trip. I brought home pictures of mushrooms I thought were interesting. This book helped me get started on identifying them.

NOTE - DO NOT IDENTIFY USING PICTURES, USE THE ID GUIDES IN THE BOOK

Frankly, it is the identification guides that are most valuable to me as a beginner. Without them, I'd be tempted to use pictures in a pocket guide. That works fine for fauna, but can be fatal for fungi.

My experience with the book itself is that I am goal oriented when I pick it up. "What is that one?" I then find myself having fun browsing through the book. It just draws me in. I love the parts saying "edible, but not worth it" or "supposedly edible, but I never cared to try".

I wouldn't expect kids to enjoy this book, but they're generally too impulsive to trust around unknown fungi anyway. ... Read more

Editorial Review

With more than 300 photos, this new edition shows how to identify more than 500 healing plants. Descriptive text includes information on where the plants are found, as well as their known medicinal uses. An index to medical topics, symbols next to plant descriptions, and organization of plants by colors all make this an essential guide to understanding the traditional medicinal uses of the plants around us. At a time when interest in herbs and natural medicine has never been higher, the second edition of this essential guide shows how to identify more than five hundred kinds of healing plants. More than three hundred new color photos illustrate their flowers, leaves, and fruits. The updated descriptive text includes information on where the plants are found as well as their known medicinal uses. An index to medical topics is helpful for quickly locating information on specific ailments, from asthma and headaches to colds and stomachaches. Symbols next to plant descriptions give readers a quick visual alert to plants that are poisonous or may cause allergic reactions. Organized by plant color for fast identification, this guide is an indispensable tool for understanding the traditional medicinal uses of the plants and herbs around us. ... Read more

Reviews

An herbal degree in our pocket, May 5, 2000
Here is everything that a field guide should be and contain--small enough to stick into a pocket but comprehensive, definitive, dependable and well-illustrated. Pictures, descriptions, locations, uses, warnings. Foster is not only an herbalist of the first rank but one of the finest plant photographers out there clicking. His gorgeous Healing Plants calendar is on my wall; the verdant photos provide daily pleasure. Herbal preparations as alternatives to synthetic drugs are increasingly chosen. St. John's Wort for depression, Saw Palmetto for prostate treatment, Goldenseal for a multitude of symptoms. Not typically thought of as herbs, trees are also a part of our living pharmacy and 66 are included here. Ginkgolides extracted from leaves of the Ginkgo tree (ginkgo biloba) are the best-selling herbal preparation in Europe. Aspirin derives from the willow. Amongst shrubs I learned that Hawthorn leaf and flower preparations are used in Germany to treat congestive heart failure, based on at least 14 controlled clinical studies. With increasing usage, many plants are in danger of being overharvested. Conservation is necessary to preserve a viable natural community of plants that can and may help alleviate human suffering. Stopping plant thieves is a law enforcement challenge but easy identification of plants may save others of us from bulldozing a patch of ginseng for a house site. It is noted that Pale Purple Coneflower (Echinacea pallida) "is common in eastern Kansas but it is very rare in western North Carolina at the eastern extreme of its range. The plant might be judiciously harvested in Kansas, but in North Carolina it should be left alone." More than just a field guide, Medicinal Plants and Herbs is an essential reference book for our personal library. The value of this big little book can hardly be overestimated.

Intriguing Herbal Lore for the Amateur Botanist, November 1, 2001
Just when you thought there were no more plant identification guides to be written, Peterson's came out with this interesting little guide. In its pages you will find the many thousands of uses that numerous cultures have found for North American plants. From dubious cure-alls to modern cancer drugs, this guide describes them all, and their poisonous look alikes. If you already have Peterson's tree or wildflower guides, be prepared for a bit of Deja vu - there is considerable overlap in both text descriptions and illustrations. Also, don't set up your folk remedy pharmacy just yet - this book doesn't give dosage advice for the vast majority of species it describes. The authors are very strident in saying that this book is for information only, not clinical advice. That said, you will find innumerable fascinating tidbits of herbal lore between its covers.

Eastern/Central Medicinal Plants and Herbs, April 22, 2000
I have just recently become interested in learning about the wild plants of my area and this book seems to be the most extensive resource about medicinal plants available. I like it because it is clear and concise, contains information on plant use and history, has color photographs to go with each entry, and includes poisonous look-a-likes and possible side effects of otherwise safe plants. I do, however, find the organization to be a bit confusing. For instance, it is simple to find the section on plants with yellow flowers, the pages are color coded, but difficult to differentiate between sections for button like composite flowers and dandelion like flowers. This results in a lot of time spent looking at pictures of yellow flowers. I much prefer the orginization of the Peterson Guide to Edible Wild Plants, which is similar but more clearly labled. I also think that the line pictures in that book have many benifits over the photographs contained in the medicinal plants field guide. The drawings offer well focused close up views from more than one angle if neccessary, this is not always possible with photos and a few pictures in the book are fuzzy. Overall I think that this is an excellent resource book.

Great field guide, December 2, 2003
Though I don't live in the eastern US and have rarely had a chance to do field botany when I have been there, this is a great little reference when I am researching herbs found in the eastern US. Again, Dr. Duke's and Mr. Foster's great knowledge and willingness to organize it for the rest of us is deeply appreciated.

Can always count on the field guide books, September 2, 2003
I took it and used it. It's filled with great information. I only wish it had a quick plant look up structure where we can identify plants based on leaves and flowers. You know like one of those indexes that has a quick leaf and flower recognition tabs on the side. Either way a good research book and very indepth.

THE Standard, Of Course, September 23, 2006
The best of its genre, and the standard in visual identification guides for field work and species' recognition. Almost every item is illustrated with color photographs, though I wish there were more images of each item, for year-round accurate ID. If I could afford to, I'd own the entire publication list of "A Field Guide To...". :-)

I'll share a secret to successful purchasing. I borrow books & titles I'm interested in buying, from local library--this has proven the BEST method for being sure one's needs & expectations are met, especially in non-fiction reference materials.

Great!! With another book., July 3, 2006
I have the old copy of their editable plants guide and when combined with this one, great!

The pics are in color but they lack detail for identifying.
Especially poisonous plants. Take poison hemlock, they tell you to be careful with look alikes, but their pics do not show the very suttle differances.
I use the editable plant guide for cross referance. That old book has black and white drawn diagrams and specifically points out identification marks.

The info in the medicinal plant guides is very good. They tell you approved uses and folk lore uses.

Overall a great book, shame the identifing aspect lacks some. That is the purpose of the book I would think! Its a field guide after all.

I dont regret buying it, I am glad I did. The info is great. But it sucks needing another book for identifying from pics!

Well produced book., August 13, 2005
I found the guide very informative. My only complaint is that some of the pictures were so small you could not properly view all plants.

Excellent, January 9, 2007
Very helpful in identifying the plants, the pictures are wonderful and also for identifying some of the uses these plants have been used for

A Field Guide to Medicinal Plants and Herbs: Of Eastern and Central North America (Peterson Field Guides (R)), February 8, 2007
This Is also A Book To have around no matter what, Very good book, Full of awsome information that you need . Very Reccomended for those the love the woods and nature , Good the have with you if you hike or go on nature walks ... Read more

Editorial Review

With their colorful leaves, sculptural shapes, and simple care, succulents are beautiful yet forgiving plants for pots. If grown in containers, these dry-climate jewels—which include but are not limited to cacti—can be brought indoors in winter and so can thrive anywhere in the world. 

In this inspiring compendium, the popular author of Designing with Succulents provides everything beginners and experienced gardeners need to know to create stunning container displays of exceptionally waterwise plants. The extensive palette includes delicate sedums, frilly echeverias, cascading senecios, edgy agaves, and fat-trunked beaucarneas, to name just a few. Easy-to-follow, expert tips explain soil mixes, overwintering, propagation, and more.

Define your individual style as you effectively combine patterns, colors, textures, and forms. Discover how top designers interpret the dramatic options, in ideas ranging from exquisite plant-and-pot combinations to extraordinary topiaries and bonsai. Expand your repertoire with plump-leaved plants that resemble pebbles, stars, and undersea creatures. Short on space? Create vertical gardens and hanging baskets, and use daisylike rosettes in wall displays.

Each of the more than 300 photographs offers an inspiring idea. A-to-Z descriptions cover 350 of the best succulents, plus companion plants. Whether your goal is a gorgeous potted garden for a sunny windowsill or outdoor living area—or simply making great gifts—this is a comprehensive primer for creating vibrant, living works of art.

Editorial Review

Take some of the mystery out of a walk in the woods with this new field guide from the author of Reading the Forested Landscape.Thousands of readers have had their experience of being in a forest changed forever byreading Tom Wessels’s Reading the ForestedLandscape. Was this forest once farmland?Was it logged in the past? Was there ever amajor catastrophe like a fire or a wind stormthat brought trees down?

Now Wessels takes that wonderful abilityto discern much of the history of the forestfrom visual clues and boils it all down to amanageable field guide that you can take outto the woods and use to start playing forestdetective yourself. Wessels has created a key—a fascinating series of either/or questions—to guide you through the process of analyzing what you see. You’ll feel like a woodlandSherlock Holmes. No walk in the woods willever be the same. 50 color photographs ... Read more

Reviews

Forest Forensics, November 7, 2010
Forest forensics is CSI meets AMC. This is wonderful book, if you live in the northeastern US or Canada and spend time in the outdoors. You will come to see the landscape around you in a whole new way - to read the history of the impacts of hurricanes, farming, logging etc. The book has clear descriptions tied to beautiful color plates, so you understand exactly what he's talking about. For example, only large rocks in rock wall indicate that the adjoining land was a hay field, small rocks indicate regular crop cultivation which causes small rocks to surface. Upon first read, even before you take to the field, you will begin to say "Ah ha", as you recall seeing various forms of rock fences, tree forms, or stumps. Not only does he help you read the events of the past, but date them. This book is very accessible and just plain fun. And best of all, while this book helps you answer lots of questions, your observations will reveal a new level of subtly and leave you with even more questions. If you enjoy the woods, whether kayaker, backpacker, weekend hiker or skier, buy this book. You will see the world around you in a new way.

Amazing book, October 31, 2010
If you spend any time in the outdoors and have wondered about what you are seeing, purchase this book. It will make your walks more enjoyable!

Note Your Geogrphic Location, December 15, 2010
Take note this book advises you it is for the NE of the United States. Before purchasing it make sure you will be in or close proximity to the NE or Canada. ... Read more

Editorial Review

Of all our childhood memories, few are quite as thrilling, or as tactile, as those of climbing trees. Scampering up the rough trunk, spying on the world from the cool green shelter of the canopy, lying on a limb and looking up through the leaves at the summer sun almost made it seem as if we were made for trees, and trees for us.Even in adulthood, trees retain their power, from the refreshing way their waves of green break the monotony of a cityscape to the way their autumn transformations take our breath away. 

In this lavishly illustrated volume, the trees that have enriched our lives finally get their full due, through a focus on the humble leaves that serve, in a sense, as their public face. The Book of Leaves offers a visually stunning and scientifically engaging guide to six hundred of the most impressive and beautiful leaves from around the world. Each leaf is reproduced here at its actual size, in full color, and is accompanied by an explanation of the range, distribution, abundance, and habitat of the tree on which it’s found. Brief scientific and historical accounts of each tree and related species include fun-filled facts and anecdotes that broaden its portrait. 

The Henry’s Maple, for instance, found in China and named for an Irish doctor who collected leaves there, bears little initial resemblance to the statuesque maples of North America, from its diminutive stature to its unusual trifoliolate leaves. Or the Mediterranean Olive, which has been known to live for more than 1,500 years and whose short, narrow leaves only fall after two or three years, pushed out in stages by the emergence of younger leaves.

From the familiar friends of our backyards to the giants of deep woods, The Book of Leaves brings the forest to life—and to our living rooms—as never before.

Reviews

A Unique, Wonderful and Complete Tree & Leaf Reference Book, October 29, 2010
I purchased this book after reading a great review of it in the Chicago Tribune. It is just as the review described -- a great reference book for the trees of the world, complete with copies of the leaves, typically pictured in their exact size. After perusing the book, I soon recognized, however, that it would be great if the authors could publish a sequel that would limit the coverage just to the trees of the United States and not the entire world. Clearly, this sequel would be of a much-reduced size, but I think the authors would soon find that there would be a great demand for such a book of more limited scope. Anyway, the authors clearly have made a great contribution. I am not an arborist or the like but simply wanted something to bring me more up to speed on what is growing in my tree-infested yard (and elsewhere).

Specialty Book with Wide Appeal, November 3, 2010
"The Book of Leaves" is appealing to many readers, perhaps even more than Alan Coombs, the author and Zsolt Debreczy, his editor, even imagined. The book features leaves from 600 trees, one to a page. Each page presents a full-sized photograph of the leaf, a smaller photograph in the case of compound leaves, a short description of the tree and leaf, a world-map showing the origin of the tree, a sketch of the tree with an estimate of its size, a chart with relevant facts on the tree and a short paragraph describing the distintion between the subject leaf and similar leaves. This is a lot of information on one page but the pages are well designed and never look crowded or busy. The book includes a glossary of botanic terms, and a chapter explaining how to identify a tree by its leaf. There is an index of trees by common name and another index by Latin name. The trees are grouped by their botanic family, and listed alphabetically. The book includes only trees of the 'temperate' zone, which is most of North America.

Photographers will appreciate the quality of the pictures. Perfect specimens were photographed in a studio and the veins, serrations and details of the leaves are readily visible. Naturalists will appreciate the difficulties of collecting 600 perfect leaf samples from many places and keeping the leaves fresh until they were photographed. The author graciously thanks all who contributed to this phase of the project.

Students and professionals in botany, forestry and horticultural will appreciate the concise presentation of facts and the wonderful photographs. The general reader will find that the book is fun. Who would have ever guessed that there are so many maple trees? So many oak trees? Who does not want to know the name of the tree in their backyard, in the park, on the street? And, the tree may have been imported from China! I can see children studying the pages, leaf in hand.

"The Book of Leaves" not include cultivars, and, for the most part, other identifying characteristics such as buds, bark and stems. All of photographs were taken when the leaves were green so Fall colors have to be imagined. These omissions do not limit the usefulness of this well-designed, attractive book.

Prodigious effort wasted, November 23, 2010
As trees are essential to human life on earth, this book seemed a natural for visualizing their attributes. A fine introduction/preface is followed by photographic images, most life-size, of every type of leaf imaginable, in color. BUT, the color used is the exact same shade of green for each of those 600 trees, which cannot possibly be authentic and renders this book MONOTONOUS in the extreme. Although it is printed on fine paper in an excellent binding, the zero-variation in leaf color negates the obviously-prodigious work done to produce this book, and I returned it for a refund of the purchase price. ... Read more

Editorial Review

More mushrooms, less pollution! Yes, you heard right: growing more mushrooms may be the best thing we can do to save the environment. Microscopic cells called "mycelium"—the fruit of which are mushrooms —recycle carbon, nitrogen, and other essential elements as they break down plant and animal debris in the creation of rich new soil. What fungi expert Paul Stamets has discovered is that mycelium also breaks down hydrocarbons —the base structure in many pollutants. So, for instance, when soil contaminated with diesel oil is inoculated with strains of oyster mushroom mycelia, the soil loses its toxicity in just eight weeks. In MYCELIUM RUNNING, Stamets discusses this revolutionary trend in mushroom cultivation and provides tips for choosing the appropriate species of fungi for various environmental purposes. ... Read more

Reviews

Super Valuable Information, December 1, 2005
Last summer I attended one of Paul's seminars at Fungi Perfecti. Living near by it was easy to attend however I had absolutely no knowledge of mushrooms other than eating Portobellos et al., and reading a little about the possibility of plugging stumps and logs. In fact, at the seminar I felt a bit out of place amongst all of the others who had particular goals and agendas for being there. I figured a bit of education could help me understand this whole mushroom thing. When I left I was completely blown away by all of the possibilities that mycelium offer and by Fungi Perfecti's excellent presentation of this data. Most all of what Paul and his staff taught in this seminar is in this book.

This fascinating book is a treasure trove of effective low tech methods for 'running mycelium'. Paul describes everything from gardening techniques to soil restoration to health care application using typical gourmet mushrooms (oh what Oyster mushrooms can do) and many other species. As a scientist, he backs his data with reputable references. He also uses language that may be challenging to those not educated in the biological/medical sciences. However, not unlike Dr. Andrew Weil's publications, it is nearly impossible to simplify this type of information without giving all audiences from foresters to backyard gardeners to medical practitioners enough information to help everyone understand how powerful this natural filter in soil is regardless of their educational background.

Mycelium Running has very high quality color photos, detailed 'how tos' anyone can follow and specifics describing the chemistry of this powerful ally in its myriad of uses. This is a wonderful text that hopefully will assist us in restoring our battered environment and ailing health one backyard and human body at a time. For what it is worth, this is perhaps the most important and interesting book I have purchased in years. Now I have piles of card board stacked around my property successfully running all kinds of mycelium from spent mushroom kits. I expect to further the `running' using the techniques from this book to build more productive gardens and help keep Rue Creek running clean.

Because of Fungi Perfecti and Mycelium Running's superb information, I have truly become 'beshroomed'. I now go out of my way to educate friends, relatives, neighbors and co-workers alike of the beneficial effects of growing better gardens, managing yard waste (instead of burning), mitigating damage by clear cut logging, cleaning up polluted soil and water ways, removing termites and ants (cannot wait to get an off the shelf solution for this!), alternative/supplemental solutions for treating disease/cancer and every day use for maintaining good health. All of this is painstakingly described in this book; simply amazing.

Paul and his staff are the type of people who do wonderful things for humanity. So wonderful, it makes me want to start a new career and open a natural healing center. Because of Mycelium Running, it would seem there is high probability of significant grassroots restoration of earth and human body. Do yourself a huge favor and spend the money to get this book; it is worth its weight in gold. Next thing you'll find is that you'll be running mycelium in some way, shape or form. It is that easy. Kudos to Paul, Dusty and FP staff for your dedication and hard work!

Inspiring!, December 9, 2006
One of my students recommended this book and I had no idea what I was getting into. A book on fungi that I can't tear myself away from? Yes, it's true. Stamets has made mushrooms his life's work. He knows them like no one else. He presents information based on real science, yet he writes in an easy-to-follow conversational tone. And anyone with a bit of patience can grow fungi using the methods Stamets describes. The things he and his colleagues are doing with mushrooms and tree fungi will astound you. A common mushroom that eliminates diesel fuel from contaminated soil! A tree fungus that out-competes (controls)American Chestnut blight! Erosion control, sewage treatment, enhancing forest health and human health... the list is long and truly inspiring. I am eager for warmer weather so I can get outside and start my own experiments with fungi. And perhaps best of all is the fact that most of these incredibly useful organisms are also edible gourmet delights! This is my first book by Paul Stamets. I am now ready to buy his earlier works (as well as a good field guide to mushrooms and other fungi).

The most comprehensive mushroom/fungi book out there, February 21, 2006
Paul Stamets truly knows the material and has some great insights into the world of growing mushrooms. He succinctly describes how the science of the relatively unknown 5th kingdom (fungi) can be applied to mycoremediation to help unpollute the planet. Even though this sounds like a heavy subject, the material is understandable for people with little scientific or fungal knowledge and helps anybody understand hwo they too can get closer to mushrooms.

Mushrooms can be interesting., March 24, 2007
I took my last science course about 40 years ago and had forgotten how interesting science can be. This book is not light reading and some people will probably not get past the first few pages but I really enjoyed it. I found tons of new information on mushrooms in spite of the fact that I studied mushrooms in college (until my father decided science was not for girls and convinced me to go to Law School. Yep, those were the good old days.) You will enjoy it as long as you take into account that it is a scientific book, perfect for geeks.

Fungi Can Help Save the World, December 5, 2009
When research biologist Paul Stamets suggests fungi can help save the world, he is absolutely serious. In fact, he contends they can rescue it in several different ways. There are the medicines to be derived from fungi, probably more than we can yet imagine. Fungi for insect pest control. Fungi can absorb and often digest toxics from their environments---toxics as diverse as heavy metals, PCB's, oil spills, and radioactivity. Fungal partnerships can revolutionize our farming methods. And we can heal the ecosystems of damaged forest lands by introducing selected fungal species into those environments. Paul Stamets is one of the visionaries of our time. He is revolutionizing the ways we look at fungi.

This book starts by teaching the basics of mycology. Mycelium are fungal threads that form a network, usually underground. Mushrooms are just their fruiting bodies. Mycelium are so tiny that one cubic inch of soil can contain enough to stretch for 8 miles. But mycelial networks can cover as much as thousands of acres, making certain varieties of fungi the largest organisms in the world, as well as some of the oldest. Fungi build soil by breaking down organic matter, and even cracking apart rocks. Besides that, fungal mycelium enter into symbiotic relationships with trees and other green plants, helping
them get water and nutrients from the wider environment by surrounding and even penetrating the roots.

Paul Stamets believes mycelium are information sharing membranes in their environments. He says they are aware, react to change, have the long term health of their host environment in mind, and devise diverse enzymatic and chemical responses to challenges. He cites research to back up these ideas. In other words, he is telling us fungi are intelligent, sentient organisms. Because they regulate the flow of nutrients through the food chain, we can use them to bioengineer ecosystems.

It has been estimated that three fourths of our medicines come from nature originally. Fungi, Paul Stamets claims, show incredible promise as sources of future pharmaceuticals. Many kinds of fungal mycelium compete with bacteria and viruses in the soil, and in doing that, they secrete a variety of chemical substances that kill those microorganisms. So fungi could protect us from microbial infections in three ways: as antibiotics, by increasing our immunity to fight diseases, and by constructing mycelial mats to filter disease contaminated water. He says, "Preliminary studies on mushrooms have revealed novel antibiotics, anti-cancer chemotherapeutic agents, immunomodulators, and a slew of other active constituents." Stamets himself has discovered and patented fungal extracts effective in protecting human blood cells
against pox viruses. This particular fungi that kills pox viruses lives only in the old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, as do many other fungal species in that wet climate. He reminds us that these have been logged to the point where only 5% of the old growth are left standing, and who knows what other medicines have been, or still could be lost by this practice. He also discusses the effectiveness some fungal species have shown against the HIV virus, so research is actively continuing on that front.

This book contains information on using selected mycelium as "mycopesticides" to control certain insects, such as ants, termites, or beetle blights in forests, with negligible damage to other species or the environment. And these mycelium will continue to grow and offer long term protection.

Mycoremediation is the name Paul Stamets gives to the "use of fungi to degrade or remove toxins from the environment" by using mycelial mats. Fungi can be used to clean up mercury, polychlorobiphenols (PCB's), fertilizers, munitions, dyes, estrogen-based pharmaceuticals, neurotoxins--including DDT, dioxins, and stored nerve gas. Fungi can also break down oil spills, although several patents on some species are stopping the use of them for clean-ups, he tells us. Mycoremediation apparently takes quite a bit of skill in choosing the best fungi for a given situation, considering both beneficial and hostile competitive microbes in the environment. Also in some cases, these toxin-absorbing mushrooms need to be harvested and taken to toxic waste sites to be stored, incinerated, or otherwise recycled, he advises.

This book advocates no-till farming, because tilling breaks up mycelial mats, which then lets the soil erode. No-till farming also disrupts wildlife less, uses less energy and fertilizer, and releases less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. He tells us that polysaccharides secreted by mycelium bind soils from erosion. And many temperate fungal species produce glycoproteins to protect mycelium from freezing with the added benefit that they protect green plants during extreme cold. Mycelium decomposing organic matter also raises soil temperatures. So by encouraging mycelium formation, farmers can
build soils while creating mycofiltration membranes to trap farm pollutants, such as water run-off contaminated with manure. Mycelium Running has a large section of detailed information on farming and gardening with mycelium.

Paul Stamets explains the principles of mycoforestry, which preserves native forests, recovers and recycles debris, enhances replanted trees, and strengthens sustainability of ecosystems. He describes methods of introducing certain species of fungi into recently logged or burned areas to aid in forest recovery, using native fungal species and matching them to the trees they usually partner. When the mycelium eventually put up mushrooms to reproduce, those are eaten by birds and other animals, who further fertilize the soils and drop seeds from other plant species there, so the new ecosystem
develops quickly.

The last approximately one third of this book is devoted to detailed information on many individual fungal species, their natural habitats, methods of cultivation, how to harvest and cook them if they aren't poisonous, their possible medicinal properties, and their potential for mycorestoration of ecosystems.

Paul Stamets has a retail company called Fungi Perfecti, which sells equipment for growing fungi, spores, kits to grow them, fungal medicinals and other fungal derived products, books about fungi, gifts, etc. All the products are certified organic by the Washington State Department of Agriculture. He also offers classes in growing mushrooms and other fungi, and occasional classes in mycorestoration at his place near Olympia, Washington. You can get a color paper catalog from Fungi Perfecti, or visit his web site: [...]
Paul Stamets has received many awards from environmental organizations for his research on fungi and repairing damaged ecosystems. He has written numerous articles and academic papers on medicinal, culinary, and psychoactive mushrooms,
and several books on mushroom cultivation.

Mycelium Running is a beautiful book with color photos and illustrations on almost every page. This is THE book to read if you are interested in using mushrooms medicinally, ridding environments of toxic chemicals, recovering damaged forests, or practicing sustainable agriculture, particularly permaculture.

review by Sher June, [...]

An Inspiration and Idea Generating Book!, January 3, 2007
This is a very well written and organized book, using this has enabled us to do some really wonderful things on our own property and inspired us to do even more. Mr. Stamets has done more to enlighten people about the benefits of fungi than anyone else and in a way that makes it fun and interesting. Will open your eyes to a whole new world.

Great Book!, April 6, 2008
I purchased this book as a gift for a fellow graduate student who is studying the relationship between vascular plant roots and fungi. He and our professor/advisor oohhed and aahhed over it. I should have gotten one for our advisor too!

A quality book with great photos through-out and it is very readable! I have come to the conclusion that mycologists aren't pretentious wordy folks! They enjoy their work, enjoy spreading their knowledge and it is obvious in this book! I agree with the previous reviews - this book should be recommended, if not required reading for any botany or mycology course.

Should be Required Reading, July 16, 2007
This book is incredible. If more people read this book, there could be an ecological revolution.

The reader will not go a page in this book without a "What?? No Way!!" kind of moment. I found myself laughing simply at how amazingly effective and important mushrooms can be.

Mushrooms can help save the world. "Mycelium Running" should be a high school textbook.

this is an incredibly interesting + informative book, February 22, 2006
This is a well written, interesting book. And mycelium running has more relevance than I ever imagined (if I thought about it at all). In general, I'd ditch science books for literature in 2 seconds. But I just can't put this book down. It's definitely worth your $$$.

Mushrooms saving the world?, October 10, 2007
The title suggests that mushrooms can solve the world's problems, and that sounds a little hard to believe. But fact is that the authors put so much knowledge about the growing habits of mushrooms in this book that it can indeed be used to solve problems. For example, the authors mention recovery of burnt areas as well as the absorption of spilled oil.

The book on the whole is impressive and full of knowledge, as wel as beautifully illustrated. Anyone considering to grow mushrooms should read it; and practitioners of permaculture are certainly advised to get this book. ... Read more

Editorial Review

Smell the bark of the aromatic Sassafras. Wonder at the Lodgepole Pine, whose heat-activated cones reseed forests destroyed by fire. Search for the Sugar Maple, whose foliage blazes red and yellow in autumn. North America's trees rank among nature's most awesome creations. This premier field guide features all characteristics-tree shape, bark, leaf, flower, fruit and twig-for quick identification, making it a superior choice for trail walks, creating displays, and scientific or commercial needs.

-All of North America in one volume
-Over 730 species in 76 families and 160 range maps
-Native species and important introduced foreign varieties
-Text, range maps, and illustrations seen together at a glance
-Common and scientific names
-Convenient measuring rules
... Read more

Reviews

A Terrific Book!, October 28, 2003
I am a garden writer, horticulturist and botanist and I think Golden Books' Trees of North America is a darn good book. It is small enough to shove in a pocket and take along on hikes...it is easy to use, full of good information, and makes tree ID easy in most cases.
I recommend this book as a present for anyone interested in trees, in Nature, in gardening. Although it is a Golden Book and is easy to use and understand, it is by no means a book just for kids. This is an excellent book, as was the older Golden Books Trees of North America, a book I have taken along with me on many a trip. Worth every penny of the price and then some!

color illustrations make the difference, October 30, 2001
As a college graduate in Botany, I have seen many field guides. I probably own of 30 in different categories, and this one is one of my favorites. It was the only one I carried on a trip to California to identify trees in the Bay area. The color illustrations make a huge difference as they are very accurate and easy to use a field guides. It does require you to have a little more than a basic knowledge of trees, as it does not start out with a dicotomous key.

Been a big help, October 8, 2005
I'm a forester and I know my native trees, but I am now helping a co-worker in urban forestry. I'm having to identify ornamental trees that I do not know so well and this book has been a major help in the field. It fits nicely into my saftey vest too. I definitely recommend this book as a reference for both common native trees and also for ornamental trees.

Trees of North America, June 25, 2006
Real good. Has leaf and bud and fruit drawings. Shows geographically location of each species. Has pictures of bark and branch spacing. Shows general tree height and shape. Information well organized.

Lavishly illustrated with just the right amount of detail., March 8, 2006
While not as detailed as other field guides, the Golden Books Trees of North America contains just the right amount of information for amatuer naturalists and is lavishly illustrated. The organization of the book also lends itself to quick and accurate identification of trees. The book is a wonderful resource.

Leaf Peeper's Review, October 28, 2005
This is an excellent resource for identifying trees by their foliage. The illustrations are detailed and accurate. The descriptions are concise and descriptive. It is small enough so that it can fit into your pocket and taken along in the field. It is an excellent resource for teaching children all about trees.

First-rate guide, June 12, 2002
The best book I found for understanding the classification of trees, and for clarifying the differences between the major tree families...

Excellent field guide, August 25, 2006
This book is excellent for just carrying around as a field guide, probably one of the best there is. Good artwork and descriptions, kept short and simple, with all general identification features included. Large list of native trees with some exotic species as well, it doesn't leave any important ones out.

A lot of info in a small package, June 29, 2007
Price and size are what makes this guide so great. It provides a good overview of the trees of North America in a very portable format.

The small size, however, means that the illustrations are not as large or detailed as we would prefer. It also limits the amount of specific information that can be included. We recently relocated to the Pacific Northwest and have found region-specific books (particularly from Lone Pine Publishers) to be superb.

I recommend this as a great resource at a very good price.

Excellent smaller guide, December 4, 2005
This is a decent little book that's easy to tote around. Sometimes I think that pictures help more than drawings for tree identification but this book makes up for it with good written details for each entry. Can't be beat for something to throw in the backpack. ... Read more

Editorial Review

Tree peepers everywhere will enjoy these two guides which explore the incredible environment of our country's forests-including seasonal features, habitat, range, and lore. Nearly 700 species of trees are detailed in photographs of leaf shape, bark, flowers, fruit, and fall leaves -- all can be quickly accessed making this the ideal field guide for any time of year.

Note: the Eastern Edition generally covers states east of the Rocky Mountains, while the Western Edition covers the Rocky Mountain range and all the states to the west of it. ... Read more

Reviews

There is a better book, January 23, 2000
If you live north of a line from Virginia to Northern California get Trees of Northern United States and Canada by John Farrar: a) Superior Bark Photographs - bark at different ages when necessary, full trunk shown b) Line drawings leaf, bud and flower (supplemented with color photos when necessary). c) Key guides for both summer and winter identification. d) Everything on one page. This book is the result of over 40 years by the Canadian Forest Service.

Pretty, but mostly useless, November 3, 1999
If you are serious about identifying trees, this book won't help much. A lot of the most common trees are omitted, particularly in the oak family. The thrust of this book seems more toward the odder varieties. I wish I had my money back.

A good secondary reference, March 16, 2002
This book relies heavily on color photos of bark, leaves, flowers, and fruiting bodies. This method makes winter identification diificult, and even when in leaf subtleties which differentiate species may not be evident. I use the Peterson guide to trees and shrubs (ISBN 039535370X) as my primary resource, and use the Audubon book as a secondary source.

National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Trees, May 18, 2002
This is a excellant ID manual for the trees in the eastern USA and Canada. I feel that the way the manual is layed out is a big plus. The photos are very good. This is a book for all levels of the studing of these beautiful kings of the earth.

The only area that can be improved (in my opinion) is the IDing of trees in the winter stage or off season.

Overall, this book/manual is very portable and is easy to transport, fitting well in a backpack.

A conprehensive field guide to the trees of the E. U.S., January 10, 1997
This field guide is an excellent field to the trees typically found east of the continental divide of the United States. This guide includes photos and descriptions of 315 species of trees, excluding about 100 trees of south Florida and a small number of imported varieties. The front 1/2 of the book includes 630 photos of leaves and bark, flowers, cones and fruit, and autumn leaves. The second 1/2 contains detailed descriptions of the 315 species presented in the front portion of the book. A detailed index including both common and scientific names is found in the rear of the book

Great reference!, July 6, 2002
We just purhased some new land with an abundance of trees. While I don't consider myself to be a tree expert, there where quite a few that stumped my husband and I. This is where this great little book came in handy. It lets you identify trees based on either flower, leaf, bark, etc and has them sorted into appropriate sections with colored photos. Needless to say, we have used this book time and time again. It is a nice size too so that you can take it with you.

I love this guide!, February 4, 2000
There may be better books out there (according to other reviews contained herein), but, for the novice, I don't think you'll find an easier to use guide. I have two other Audubon guides as well and plan on adding more to my collection.

Loved it, October 14, 2005
Just another wonderful book by the National Audubon Society. It is great to take with you when working out in the field, it is easy to carry, the pictures are wonderful and detailed. I can't say enough.

Getting to know your friends, November 4, 2006
Trees thrive all around us; but how much do we know about them? If you want to learn about your best friends and neighbors in a hurry, Elbert Little's field guide is a good way. I lived with a Black Walnut for 23 years before realizing my tall friend is the scarcest and most coveted of native hardwoods and was especially terrific for gunstocks. And I didn't know my two neighborly Common Persimmons were having a lovely relationship with one another (they must in order to produce the fruit), nor that their name was derived from the Algonquin.

If you'd like to identify a stranger, Little's organization by thumb tabs based on leaf shape makes it easy to find the section where your tree is pictured with its leaves and bark in a full color photo. He also provides separate sections showing us flowers and fruit. You'll be charmed by an especially brilliant section showing red, orange, brown and gold autumn leaves.

Who but a dendrologist, or tree identification specialist, would know so well how to share all this knowledge of trees? And Elbert Little is not just any dendrologist, mind you, but the former Chief Dendrologist of the U.S. Forest Service.

What is a tree, really? According to Little, it's a "woody plant with an erect perennial trunk at least 3 inches in diameter at breast height, and definitely formed crown of foliage, and a height of at least 13 feet." That's good to know.

If you love words (as I do), you're lucky to get a glossary with "lanceolate," "nutlet," "pith," "sepal," "stamen," and "whorled" fully explained. Besides a wealth of full color photos, the guide includes 400 pages of prose narratives and black and white diagrams describing the 315 native trees of the eastern two thirds of the continent arranged by family, as well as the common naturalized or introduced trees you'd be likely to run into in parks or cities.

Here's a recommendation for you: walk in the woods for love of trees.

"If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day," Thoreau tells us, "he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."

The danger of being regarded as a loafer is worth risking. Let this book be your companion. For all that's inside, it's amazingly small: 7.5" x 4" by 1" deep, with a soft laminated cover--perfect to fit in a jacket or backpack pocket.

It's also great for lying on the ground and placing as a pillow under your head. To look up at the trees.

Great Book, July 20, 2006
We took this book on a camping trip last weekend in North Mississippi and were able to identify every tree that we attempted to. This is a VERY GOOD field guide. ... Read more

Editorial Review

With the accelerating pace of development and subsequent habitat destruction, the pressures on wildlife populations are greater than ever. But there is a surprisingly important and relatively simple step toward reversing this alarming trend: Everyone with access to a patch of earth can make a significant contribution to sustaining biodiversity.

There is an unbreakable link between native plant species and native wildlife. Most native insects cannot, or will not, eat alien plants. When native plant species disappear, the insects disappear, thus impoverishing the food source for birds and other animals. In many parts of the world, habitat destruction has been so extensive that local wildlife populations are in crisis and may be headed toward extinction. By planting natives, everyone can provide a welcoming environment for wildlife. This doesn't need to entail a drastic overhaul of your yard or garden. The process can be gradual and can reflect both personal preferences and local sensitivities.

Bringing Nature Home has sparked a national conversation about the link between healthy local ecosystems and human well-being, and the new paperback edition -- with an expanded resource section and updated photos -- will help broaden the movement. By acting on Douglas Tallamy’s practical recommendations, everyone can make a difference.
... Read more

Reviews

This book makes me stop and think, December 9, 2007
I heard Douglas Tallamy speak at the Native Plants in the Landscape Conference at Millersville University (PA) last June, and I've been waiting for his book to be published by Timber Press.

I'm a gardener, and I don't want to grow only native plants. But this book makes me stop and think. Douglas Tallamy makes the best case for use of native plants I've read. I recommend it without reservation.

Simply put, the book's message is this. All life on earth, except for some recently discovered, relatively rare forms that take energy from volcanic vents in the ocean floor, depend on energy from the sun that plants convert into food through photosynthesis. Most of that solar energy is made available to higher life forms through insects that eat plants. With the exception of a few direct herbivores such as cows, all other higher forms of life either eat insects (most birds) or eat other animals that eat insects (hawks eating sparrows), and so on up the food chain. The productivity of an environment, literally the weight of biomass produced in a given area, is directly related to the insect population, and the variety of wildlife - number of species of birds and so on - is also directly related to the numbers and varieties of insects living there.

Research now clearly shows that native insect populations cannot be sustained by most alien plants. Our insects have co-evolved with native plants over millions of years, and most have highly specific preferences for certain plants as food. As Professor and Chair of the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, Tallamy has access to research that tells a disturbing story. With increasing urbanization and suburbanization, loss of large forest and natural areas to development, and transformation of a vast portion of the continent into ecologically sterile lawn, we can look forward to mass extinctions of insects, birds, and other forms of life that could surpass the mass extinctions caused by the great meteorite impacts long ago.

Without the literally innumerable varieties of insects that constitute the first step in transfer of solar energy into life, massive losses of species will occur in the not too distant future. Many such extinctions are actually under way.

Tallamy's statistics support his message. Native oaks, for example, support 517 lepidoptera species, willows, 456, birches, 413. In contrast, alien Clematis vitalba supports 40 species of herbivores in its homeland, but only 1 in North America. Another example, Phragmites australis supports 170 species in its homeland, but only 5 species on this continent. Unfortunately, insects can't evolve to adapt to alien species in time to save our threatened populations. Evolution takes place over millions of years. Although the Norway maple has been on the North American continent for going on 300 years, and has become the predominant shade tree here, it still has not become a productive part of our native ecosystem. Instead, it is rapidly displacing native species of maple.

Tallamy urges readers to do what they can to eliminate invasive alien species, to use native plants, to replace sterile lawns, which consist of two or three alien grass species that support little more than Japanese beetle grubs, with sustaining native plant refuges. He urges those who live in suburbia to plant native shade trees, possibly groves, to plant natives along lot lines to begin reestablishing productive areas where insects can successfully reproduce and live, and where their predators can find security and cover.

Tallamy writes with grace and humor. He makes it easy to follow his arguments, uses copious examples to relate his ideas to the natural world we all know, and uses down-to-earth anecdotes to illustrate his points clearly. The book, even with its many, for me, unpronounceable binomial Latin names for a multitude of insects, is an easy read. I finished it in two days, while busy with work and many other chores.

Like most people, I have an aversion to what I consider ugly, even frightening insects. I find it much easier to look at pictures of pretty butterflies than spiders and sawflies, but I learned a lot about the insect world while reading this book and looking at its pictures. And now I have enough knowledge to want to learn more, and to better understand how the natural world of my garden works.

I doubt I'll be able to eliminate plants of foreign origin from my garden, but I'll try to keep a much better balance of natives to aliens (mostly natives), and practice more sustainable gardening in the future. And I'll certainly work to try to convince others to reduce lawn size and incorporate native plants into their landscapes.

Love Birds? Invite Them Into Your Yard., November 20, 2007
Douglas Tallamy was captivated early by the natural world. In his engaging new book, Bringing Nature Home, Tallamy writes of spending his summer days exploring the "wild" places near his home in New Jersey. There, he also discovered the devastating effects of development when a bulldozer buried tiny toads he had watched develop from tadpoles in a polliwog pond. Our hearts go out to the nine-year-old child as he works valiantly, but futilely, to save the little creatures from being buried alive.
When he grew up, the boy who had tried to rescue toads studied the natural world, ultimately becoming Professor and Chair of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware. In the process, he discovered the extent of loss resulting from wide scale development and agricultural activities. And that is the subject of his book. But Bringing Nature Home is not another gloom and doom tome on what we humans have wrought. Instead, this engaging and highly readable book tells us how we can all be involved in turning back environmental loss in a way that will bring that wild world right into our own back yards by simply trading non-native ornamental plantings for native ones.
Bringing Nature Home is very well documented (with a bibliography longer than your arm) and full of beautiful and fascinating photos. It includes many of Tallamy's own personal landscaping experiences as well as numerous suggestions on plant choices for the rest of us.
Like Ted Williams in Wild Moments and Scott Weidensaul in Return to Wild America, Tallamy remains optimistic about the future of America's wildlife. But unlike Williams and Weidensaul, both of whom wrote eloquently about why we should connect with and want to save our natural world, the good professor's book is a prescription on how we can all work to make that happen.

GARDENING FOR THE 21ST CENTURY, January 11, 2008
This is a first-rate popular work by a mature researcher. Tallamy's arguments for using native plants in suburban gardens are convincing, often eloquent (esp. in chaps. 3 and 4). He argues that native bugs can only eat plants that they share an evolutionary history with. Our bugs just can't eat plants which have evolved in other parts of the world (i.e. alien plants). Furthermore, our birds don't feed their young on plants but can only feed their young on bugs. (This is true even if adult birds can survive on plant food alone--e.g. berries from native and alien plants alike). So bugs are necessary for bird reproduction. Therefore, as the number and diversity of native plants diminish so do the number and diversity of bugs, and, therefore, so do the number of birds since bugs are less and less available for bird reproduction. So far as reproductive nutrition is concerned, alien plants are as useful as a parking lot. Since so far as making bugs available for food, alien plants have no ecological function. What's worse, there is very little in our native ecosystem to inhibit the spread of many of these alien plants--except us!

Tallamy does not leave us hanging with just a lot of bad news. To the contrary, he offers a plan for beginning recovery in which the suburban gardener plays the central role. He celebrates the role each suburban gardener can have in restoring the habitat of native plant and animal ecosystems right in each gardener's own yard. He gave me a real excitement about creating and observing a wonderous, healthy biodiversity just outside my backdoor, a diversity much more interesting than I could ever achieve with alien plants. His hope is that this excitement could become widespread among gardeners such that suburbia and nature could reconcile.

The few times Tallamy touches upon the issue of how best to achieve this reconciliation so far as policy, he is careful not to call for any government involvement but rather to encourage grassroots action. Now I guess in general we don't want the state telling us what and what not to plant. But if his arguments are sound, some state funded education might be in order. The state has already seen fit to spend money encouraging us to plant trees, this book seems to make a fine argument that the state has an interest in encouraging us to plant certain kinds of trees an not others. Also Tallamy seems more tenative than I would be over policy regarding future importation of aliens.

But in general I think this is a great book. Indeed I've just finished it and I may be still too much in its thrall. But I put it in the rare league of two with Ricke Darke'sThe American Woodland Garden: Capturing the Spirit of the Deciduous Forest. It is a masterful work expressing, like Darke's, what might be called the new Emersonian spirit in American gardening. It really helps us become oriented toward how to cooperate with and be a part of nature in the 21st century. I suppose it goes without saying that I regard it as essential reading for every contemporary suburban gardener.

Bringing Nature Home - A MUST READ for Bird Lovers, December 16, 2007
Bringing Nature Home is a veritable cookbook for making your yard more attractive and useful to native birds by growing the plants and food they need. If you love birds, read this book and learn how you can help restore our declining bird populations. The information is also extremely useful guidance for public land managers, landscapers, and ecologists trying to create or restore natural landscapes and native communities. In addition to an overview of the worrisome state of native wildlife in the U.S. due to habitat loss, invasive species, excessive night lighting, and an ever-expanding human population, the author provides specific natural history information available nowhere else. The book is a fun and fascinating read thanks to Doug Tallamy's vast knowledge and good sense of humor.

This is the right book at the right time, January 2, 2008
This book makes a convincing case, and a call to action, for preserving biological diversity in the U.S. by shifting our home gardening practices to include native plants. The author provides useful and easy-to-understand explanations and statistics to back up his thesis, and gives specific examples of plants that can be established to optimize biological diversity in large and small home landscapes. I can't recommend this book enough as a "toolbox" for individuals to use for bringing their own backyards back to life. Be prepared to dog-ear a lot of pages!

One of the most important gardening/environmental books, March 4, 2008
Along with one of the prior reviewers, I too heard Doug Tallamy speak at the Millersville Native Plant Conference. When he said he was writing a book due out in the Fall of 2007, I put it on my iCal to check to see when it was published - It was a long wait, but it was worth it!

I have bookshelves of gardening books, but this is one of those very few that has done more than just provide useful information. It has profoundly influenced my understanding of how my yard can help create a healthy planet - not only can, but must.

The other books on my "short list": Noah's Garden by Sara Stein, Planting Noah's Garden by Sara Stein, and Insects and Gardens by Eric Grissell. Although Grissell has a blind spot with respect to the role of native plants, his was the first book that helped me appreciate the role of insects, and I'd still recommend it.

Easy, wonderful and mind blowing..., February 16, 2008
I actually had the pleasure of hearing the author on this subject in Cleveland. I was blown away. He shows this really easy way of making a difference without having to spend more money or having lots of land or even go out of your way. Tallamy is very passionate without being a fanatic and fantastically entertaining and easy to understand. He shows connections and solutions in such a way that you will be surprised you never saw them before. You can read his book front to back or leave it out on the coffee table. It works either way. You will definitely look at insects and plants in a very different manner after reading `Bringing nature home'. I have given it to many friends (with and without big yards) already and keep ordering more copies...

Fascinating and revelatory, March 17, 2008
I love this book! It's the most thought-provoking book I've ever read on gardening and environmental stewardship. I had never really realized that exotic plants don't participate as part of the food chain. As I came to realize after reading this book, planting a garden with exotic plants is like setting a table with fine silver and china, inviting your guests to dinner, and omitting the food.

The author would have us completely eliminate exotic plants from our gardens. I'm sure he'll wince if he reads this review, but I don't think I can go quite that far. I inherited a yard that is planted with the grass, trees and shrubs typically planted by developers, and I can't quite imagine starting over from scratch. But I do intend to focus on native plants for all future plantings. I had never considered the possibility before, but I can imagine getting really excited about fostering and finding the fascinating and beautiful insects depicted in his excellent photographs.

The writing style is surprisingly engaging for a topic that is fairly scientific in nature. I enjoyed every word of it.

2 green thumbs up from me!

Very Important Book!, April 16, 2008
In my opinion, "Bringing Nature Home" is one of the most important books of the decade and should be a candidate for a prize. I have not seen the perspective provided by the author in any other books or articles to date except in vague, arm-waving ways. The book clearly identifies the issues, provides data to back up the opinions, and makes logical recommendations on how to integrate the concepts in your own garden. It is also clear that the actions generally won't have additional costs, it is merely a matter of choosing between two approximately equally priced alternatives.

As someone who has battled invasives in my garden, I can attest to how monocultural an area can become. I think loss of biodiversity is likely to be a much larger issue than global warming over the next 100 years. Without biodiversity, it is likely that the natural and agricultural ecologies will likely collapse. Eliminating alien invasives and reintroducing species to enhance biodiversity is something individuals can do that will have significant impacts since the issue has to be tackled on a locale by locale basis.

We aren't going to be able to do much about global warming on a personal basis since the entire planet's population is going to want to improve their lifestyle which will inevitably result in burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests, much like the history of the United States over the last 200 years. However, maintaining the biodiversity in our own backyard on our own continent IS something that we can do independent of the rest of the world.

This book brings a different focus on the term "good for wildlife" in all of the nursery catalogs. The real revolution will come when the catalogs clearly identify regions of origin and whether or not the plants will support insect populations without significant aesthetic loss. This book may be the one to kick-start that whole process of revolutionizing the nursery trade.

By the way, I do have some "aliens" that I don't plan on giving up but having a garden that is 90% natives instead of 90% non-natives and avoiding plants identified as potentially invasive should make a big difference if it can be repeated across subdivisions. I suspect that research will end up identifying some "aliens" to be acceptable based on the types of criteria that Dr. Tallamy is proposing. Dr. Tallamy points out in his book that there is a paucity of hard data to get into a plant by plant evaluation at this time, but I suspect that the research will come over time.

An interesting and informative argument for going native, March 7, 2008
In his book, Bringing Nature Home, Tallamy presents a very interesting and compelling case for expanding the role of native plants in our landscapes. His pragmatic and grounded approach is refreshingly long on information and short on polemics.

I recommend this book anyone with a yard or garden who wants to make the most of it. Tallamy is very focused on helping homeowners make wise and satisfactory choices, and his plant lists focus on species that both support herbivore diversity and are attractive.

I'm happy that the popularity of this book is rising, and I'm sure to share it family and friends. ... Read more

Editorial Review

Hidden away in foggy, uncharted rain forest valleys in Northern California are the largest and tallest organisms the world has ever sustained–the coast redwood trees, Sequoia sempervirens. Ninety-six percent of the ancient redwood forests have been destroyed by logging, but the untouched fragments that remain are among the great wonders of nature. The biggest redwoods have trunks up to thirty feet wide and can rise more than thirty-five stories above the ground, forming cathedral-like structures in the air. Until recently, redwoods were thought to be virtually impossible to ascend, and the canopy at the tops of these majestic trees was undiscovered. In The Wild Trees, Richard Preston unfolds the spellbinding story of Steve Sillett, Marie Antoine, and the tiny group of daring botanists and amateur naturalists that found a lost world above California, a world that is dangerous, hauntingly beautiful, and unexplored.

The canopy voyagers are young–just college students when they start their quest–and they share a passion for these trees, persevering in spite of sometimes crushing personal obstacles and failings. They take big risks, they ignore common wisdom (such as the notion that there’s nothing left to discover in North America), and they even make love in hammocks stretched between branches three hundred feet in the air.

The deep redwood canopy is a vertical Eden filled with mosses, lichens, spotted salamanders, hanging gardens of ferns, and thickets of huckleberry bushes, all growing out of massive trunk systems that have fused and formed flying buttresses, sometimes carved into blackened chambers, hollowed out by fire, called “fire caves.” Thick layers of soil sitting on limbs harbor animal and plant life that is unknown to science. Humans move through the deep canopy suspended on ropes, far out of sight of the ground, knowing that the price of a small mistake can be a plunge to one’s death.

Preston’s account of this amazing world, by turns terrifying, moving, and fascinating, is an adventure story told in novelistic detail by a master of nonfiction narrative. The author shares his protagonists’ passion for tall trees, and he mastered the techniques of tall-tree climbing to tell the story in The Wild Trees–the story of the fate of the world’s most splendid forests and of the imperiled biosphere itself.


From the Hardcover edition. ... Read more

Reviews

It's Wild Up There, April 12, 2007
Kids climb trees. Then they grow up and climbing trees is one of the things of childhood they put away. Except some don't give it up. Some keep it as a hobby, and some even make academic careers from climbing trees. Richard Preston is the hobbyist kind. He is better known as a nonfiction author of such bestsellers as _The Hot Zone_ and _The Demon in the Freezer_, scary nonfiction books about dangerous diseases. He has turned his attention to tree-climbing, done by him and by professional and amateur tree enthusiasts in _The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring_ (Random House). There are still scary stories here, because this isn't the sort of tree climbing that kids do. These climbers take special equipment and haul themselves up the redwoods, 35 stories high. Sometimes they fall, but the risk of the endeavor does not seem to the attraction. They have a romantic obsession with the big trees; some of them have harnessed the obsession into academic papers and college careers, but others just climb to do so. The tree canopy sounds like an enticing place, as Preston describes it, "a world between the ground and the sky, an intermediary realm, neither fully solid nor purely air, an ever-changing scaffold joining heaven and earth, ruled by the forces of gravity, wind, fire, and time." Understandably, most of us aren't going to visit there, and most of us aren't going to meet the climbers who are smitten by the canopy, but Preston's lovely, enthusiastic descriptions of the climbers and the climbed make this an enticing report from a foreign world.

Botanists estimate that the bigger ones are over two thousand years old. Many of the tree climbers here are motivated to find the one tallest tree (and by the end of the book, they do find it, but no tree and no record stands forever). How tall a tree is would seem to be something easy to measure, but measuring a tree that is 360 feet tall to within an inch is a technical challenge. The only real way to measure the height of a tree for documentation of record-breaking is to go up with a measuring tape. There is more to such climbs, though, than breaking records. No one had suspected, before people started climbing in the canopy and spending time there, that there was "what amounted to coral reefs in the air". Not just redwoods are up there, but whole ecosystems based upon the trees, consisting of plants and animals that never come down, or that die if they do come down. There are ferns, huckleberries, earthworms, and salamanders up there, and even other trees; hemlocks, laurels, spruces, and Douglas firs have all been found growing with roots hundreds of feet in the air. The enthusiasts who scale these heights use specialized gadgets and ropes. A hammock called a Treeboat is used for overnighting in the trees, but it is a good idea to keep an extra rope on yourself in case you roll out of bed during the night. Preston has had to keep some of his secrets; the locations of some of the trees and groves he describes are given only in general terms to keep them from being tourist sites. Recreational climbing will damage a tree; "a stray kick of a climber's boot, and centuries' worth of soil and plants could be knocked off a branch." One of the most experienced climbers keeps his rope techniques classified, as he does not want recreational climbers to take advantage of them.

It isn't all biology and technology here. The humans involved are more than just tree-huggers. One is famous for finding the biggest trees, but has an intense and crippling fear of heights. Steve Sillett climbed a redwood for a lark when he was nineteen, and has been climbing and writing scientific papers on the trees and the creatures they contain for the past thirty years. Marie Antoine, a tomboy who climbed trees as a girl, did similar research, specializing on Lobaria itself. Sillett and Antoine are the stars of the book, eventually dating high up in the branches; lovemaking in a Treeboat sounds complicated. There was one big problem when they eventually got married: "The problem was to find a minister who could climb a redwood." Preston himself describes his own process of learning to climb, and that of his family who took too it. "I think it's very likely that we were the first tourists ever to visit Scotland to climb trees," he writes, and they were the first to explore the canopy of the Scotch pines there. There are plenty of ecological lessons here, whether in Scotland or California, most of them having to do with how humans have been bad for the huge forests that used to cover the temperate zones. The climbers, however, have the sort of love and respect for the trees, and the interest in learning about their biology, that may help preserve and expand the current protected stands. Let us hope Preston's informative book helps, too.

A Jewel Among the Rocks, April 28, 2007
My wife and I are voracious readers and often settle for books that are OK, but not noteworthy. Every so often a jewel pops out of nowhere and The Wild Trees is just such a book.

We were early readers of The Life of Pi, and feel this book is just such a read. Editorially, they are miles apart, but both books surprise you by just being wonderful and refrshing.

Within 30 pages of the start, you will be breathless, and then the character development begins. There is the poor son of a billionaire, a wonderful love story and of course the trees. The wonderful magnificent trees. And, it's all true.

I just bought 12 copies to send to my reading friends and just felt it would be a good thing to let others know.

Enjoy.

Wonderful, April 15, 2007
This brilliantly written story combines science and trees and climbing into one long adventure that makes the reader happy and brings these great trees to life. Redwoods are massive, the tallest trees int he world and the tallest one has recently been discovered at 379 meters by Michael Taylor, a tree surfer and avid climber who pioneered new climbing techniques. This book explores not only his story but that of many others who have come to love the Redwoods and understand them.

The trees themselves are more than 2,000 years old, at least the oldest are and there is much we can learn about our world through them. They contain up to 50% of all the new species being discovered in the world today in their living canopies. A veritable ecosystem grows up in the canipy of the tree, so that there are in fact mini-climate zones within the trees expanse.

This book evokes the granduer and majesty of the natural environment and those that have pioneered studies and also climbing and other mavericks and wonder-lusts.

A brilliant, rollicking book.

Seth J. Frantzman

Combining the splendor of nature with the magic of a pen, April 21, 2007
With the publication of The Wild Trees, Richard Preston has added one more magical book of nonfiction to the impressive list of books he has written.

This book, an exploration of the miniature world of the coast redwood trees of northern California, will imprint on your mind an indelible picture of the bounteous nature.

These gentle behemoths, the largest and tallest living things on our planet, the "blue whales of land", are awe-inspiring indeed. But they are also fragile, says the author. The largest of these trees has a thirty feet wide trunk, and it is more than three hundred fifty feet tall. The author explores the world of these wild trees with the help of Steve Sillett and Marie Antoine, a couple, both of them botanists, and Michael Taylor, a son of a wealthy real estate developer, and a small group of botanists and amateur naturalists.

This book will open your eyes to the grandeur of these trees. And it will show you the small world of insects, mosses, lichens, wandering salamanders and other small animals, ferns and plants and bushes such as huckleberry and even small trees, all living and thriving on the branches and trunks of these coast redwood trees. Exploring the canopy of these wild trees is an arduous task indeed; to climb a tree one must carry a heavy load of very long ropes and climbing gear. The author took lessons in climbing a tree at a tree-climbing school in Atlanta.

While we can all rejoice that quite a few of these sequoias are allowed to live for now in Northern California and also a couple of other parts of our country, we should always remember that ninety-six percent of the ancient redwood trees have been felled by the logging industry. What are left, writes Richard Preston, are "like a few fragments of stained glass from a rose window in a cathedral after the rest of the window has been smashed and swept away."

Combining the splendor of nature with the magic of his pen, the author has written a book filled with thrilling adventure and charming anecdotes. Written in mellifluous prose with exceptional clarity, parts of the book read like a romance novel. And some parts read like a horror novel also, full of scary situations. This book will make you shake your head with awe, and fill your heart with a renewed respect for not only the giant sequoia trees, but also for all living things in nature.

Redwoods On High, April 21, 2007
Mr. Preston has made a career from writing thrillers about killer diseases (The Hot Zone -- 1994; The Demon in the Freezer -- 2002; The Cobra Event -- 1997). In "The Wild Trees", the author shifts direction and writes about the the Redwoods trees of California (hence the title). While not the thriller like his earlier books, it is interesting about a little known topic. The heart of the book is about the lives of the eccentric scientists who climb the Redwoods for exploration. It is a good read on a cool spring night.

A once in a lifetime read!, April 23, 2007
I saw Mr. Preston on the Daily Show and thought his book might be an interesting read - boy was I surprised. The book was unlike anything I had ever read. I liked to climb trees as a boy and now that I'm retired I enjoy hiking alone in the forest. I have hiked in the redwood forests described in the book but had absolutely no clue what was really above me.

The book describes a whole world that almost all humans are unaware exists. Reading this book was like reading about some far away, and just discovered, planet.

There are books, and then there are "BOOKS" - this is a "BOOK"!!!

Thanks Richard
Duke

Beautiful trees, thoughtless people., May 6, 2007
[Edited to add: Read The Hidden Forest by Jon Luoma instead--a much better book.] The Hidden Forest: The Biography of an Ecosystem
Richard Preston's book, Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring, is really a story of obsession and recklessness. It is clear that, for both the author and the subject of the book, the quest for knowledge is just an excuse for adrenaline addiction. While Preston does give us glimpses of the interesting and intricate biology of the canopy of the redwood forest, and of other forests, I would like to have learned much more about these plants and animals. I would also have appreciated knowing far less about many of the people in the story, especially Steve Sillett. I found myself skipping over the melodrama and the self-destruction so I could get to the good parts about the trees.

At the beginning of the story, Steve Sillett is a dangerous idiot who doesn't even know how to check the oil in his car. He free-climbs a giant redwood with the full knowledge that what he is doing is illegal and very likely to kill him. As the story progresses and Sillett becomes a professor of botany, you think he might have learned something. When Richard Preston asks to be taken up into the canopy, 350 feet above the forest floor, Sillett seems to have the good sense to say no. He says, "Not only are the redwoods sensitive to damage from climbing but the whole habitat of the redwood canopy is fragile." And, refering to the safety of the climber, he says, "These trees are gnarly. There are places in the Atlas Grove where I can't justify the risk of letting anyone climb." Just a few pages later, Sillett is leading the amateur climber up into the canopy. When they go to Australia to "study" the tall trees there, they are told by the local climbing expert that not only should they not climb the trees while it's windy, they shouldn't even be in the forest on a windy day, due to the significant hazard of dead wood falling and killing someone. Of course, Sillett leads Preston and his wife on a climb high into the canopy on a very windy day while the trees are rocking. There are about a dozen points in the story where Sillett could easily have been killed. That he didn't die doesn't make him heroic, only lucky.

This would have been a great book if it had been about the trees. Instead, the story glorifies the "spirit of adventure," which is actually just plain foolishness, of the author and the subject. Sillett says of the redwood canopy, "If people start climbing around in it for recreational reasons, it will inevitably be damaged." The hero treatment that Preston gives Sillett will only encourage young adventurers to do exactly what he says they shouldn't. The book proclaims it is about the love of these magnificent trees, but I fear it will do more damage than good.

I have walked through the redwoods, and it was one of the best days of my life. There was an amazing amount to see while sticking to the trail. If I can see a 340 foot giant from the trail, do I really need to bushwhack and damage the ecosystem to see a tree that's 30 feet taller? This book should have cultivated a love of the trees for their own intrinsic beauty, and for what they can teach us about our world. Instead it pitches the trees as a playground for adventure, and this attitude is bound to lead to habitat damage.

An unknown world, June 10, 2007
Some of this book was more soap operatic than I thought it needed to be but overall it was a fascinating portrait of obsession--and thank goodness for that obsession for without it we'd be bereft of one of nature's true treasures. The book was a lovely tribute to the passion of those who find worth in what is truly an amazing organism. This book gave me a much deeper appreciation for the redwoods and that impresses me because when I visited Muir Woods I felt plenty of awe.

Preston's writing is at its most beautiful when he's telling the story of Marie Antoine. His writing was both evocative and touching and laid the foundation for Antoine's later fascination with trees. Another strength lies in the fact that Preston makes no judgments about the people about whom he writes and he does a wonderful job of conveying that they're real, complex people and he holds a mirror to the fact that though their obsession may seem foreign to most, we are all prey to our own obsessions, whatever they may be.

I found the ending of the book to be quite sad as well as a very subtle call to action. If we, in our insatiable quest for power and cheap goods, do not protect the gifts with which nature provides us, we will lose them forever.

My One Complaint Is The Redwoods Weren't Always Given Top-Billing, May 8, 2007
Speaking as someone who loves to climb trees, I can only imagine the rush that would come with scaling one of the venerable giants Richard Preston ably describes in this enchanting book. However, as someone who also respects nature and wishes it to endure, I can only hope those who read this book don't come away inspired to actually seek out the redwoods and use them as tools in a quest for an adrenaline thrill. The plain fact is, even though they are ancient in the extreme, the redwood forests are delicate environments, and human presence is the most perilous threat the trees have faced in perhaps twenty centuries of existence. If there's a criticism I have for this book, it's that Preston could have focused less on adventure and even more than he did on biology, as the fact that here on earth these awe-inspiring trees actually exist is subject matter enough.

Still Preston did a lot right. Giving readers magical descriptions of the tallest trees on earth and the biomes they support, The Wild Trees is the sort of book that awakens the imagination and bestows appreciation of the glory of the living cathedrals that are the redwood forests, these kingdoms of trees, many pre-dating Christ, beings with the capacity to outlive our own era by millennia. Telling the story of these giants, Preston uses worshipful prose that evokes what it surely must be like to stare upward into the canopy as just the right "bloom" of sunlight strikes the morning mist and falls like water through to the ground.

I would have liked less glorification of the interloping climbers who dared (in multiple meanings of the word) to reach the top of even the most imposing of redwoods but Preston, who also wrote a chilling book called The Hot Zone, which was about the world's little known close call with a deadly disease outbreak in the 1990's, knows how to make a potentially staid topic more than interesting and perhaps felt these elements were needed in order to reach a broader audience.

The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring is a book that I think will stick with a reader and provide deeper appreciation for our natural treasures. Most of all, after reading this book, I now wish I'd have gone and visited these trees when I was in northern California last summer. Maybe someday...

A Great Book, but Why all the Secrecy?, August 20, 2007
I loved this book. But then I have always loved big trees, particularly Coastal Redwoods and their distant cousins, the Giant Sequoias of the high Sierra mountains. Like most people, however, I have loved these trees from the ground up. I have never explored the canopy of giant redwoods and yet it is here, as Preston notes, that the real exciting new discoveries of science are being made. A significant percentage of earth's plant and animal species are found only in the uppermost reaches of old growth forests and only recently have scientists begun to explore these regions. Preston's book is simultaneously a survey of these new discoveries and an insight into the eccentric scientists and amateurs who have made ventured into this world and made it their own.

Much of the book centers around scientists Stephen Sillett and his (eventual) wife, Marie Antoine, two scientists who began climbing trees while they were still very young and never quite got over their fascination with tree tops. Using and innovating upon the climbing techiques of arborists and sports climbers, these scientists made stunning discoveries in the tops of the redwood forests that grow from Monterrey County in central California into southern Oregon. Small sea organisms usually found among plankton, huckleberries, unusual insects, and even an occasional Sitka Spruce have all been found in the redwood canopy. Preston does an excellent job of describing their work, personalities, and relationship. He also explains the mechanics of climbing for those of us whose last experience in trees was sometime before the age of ten. Preston's own personal climbing as a volunteer with Sillet and Antione adds a degree of realism to his narrative.

But of all the eccentric individuals who populate this book, Michael Taylor was the character with whom I felt the most empathy. Son of a wealthy real estate entreprenuer, Micheal went from one job to another with varying degrees of success, but his real passion was in finding big trees. I feel a similar, albeit not quite so focused, fascination with the out-of-doors and the natural world of California. For Michael, jobs are just a means to an end, namely supporting himself while he searches for the next big tree. It is a rare popular science writer who can make readers identify with those he writes about so compellingly, and Preston is to be commended for (again) doing such a fine job in making presenting the human element of the science he writes about.

Preston too, however, identifies with the values of those he describes in this book, including their insistence upon secrecy when it comes to the location of big trees and the groves they reside in. Indeed, even when the location of a big tree, discovered by Michael Taylor in the mid 1990s, is well known, Preston still only describes it as "in Mendocino." His publicly stated justification, and that of the biologists whose expeditions he joins, is to prevent these trees from being destroyed by people. But is this really a valid fear, especially since the bulk of these trees already lie within protected state and federal lands? The Stout tree in Jedediah Smith State Park is visited by thousands of people each year. Yet despite speculation that the roots *might* be damaged by those hiking by, there seems to be no obvious ill effect. The Dyerville Giant, the biggest tree in Humbolt Redwoods State park until 1991, was not felled by people, despite growing in the most popular grove in the park. Natural causes, notably an increased exposure to wind, is what brought it down. Even today, the other identified big trees in the various Redwood Parks are not vandalized, but revered. So where is the evidence that the destruction of park visitors is so prevalent that the location of not a single tree so gloriously described in this book can be revealed?

One suspects that Preston, Sillett and others have another motive in keeping the location of these giants a secret. They not only love big trees, but they also dislike people, and they don't wish to share their discoveries with anyone other than their trusted cohorts. Indeed, several of the characters in this book openly express misanthropic feelings. It's an understandable sentiment. But the sad fact of the matter is that this sentiment does the trees a real disservice. People believe in conservation and promote it precisely because they enjoy going into the wilderness and seeing the giant trees and experiencing the sense of reverence that comes from a perspective vastly greater than our own. Indeed, it was the supposed discovery of the "tallest tree" that led to the creation of Redwood National Park. This book, ultimately, is about people and trees. We need to be a little more understanding of both if either is to survive much longer. ... Read more