Tree story

Arboriculture

Remarkable Trees

Christina Harrison and Tony Kirk-ham (Thames & Hudson, £24.95)

Trees of Life

Max Adams (Head of Zeus, £25)

The Story of Trees

Kevin Hobbs and David West (Laurence King, £25)

THE British rejoice in what we sometimes complacently consider our unique tree heritage. Refreshingly, Remarkable Trees and Trees of Life, which cover similar ground, cast their vision across the continents, with an emphasis on trees of the world that have had a special connection with human culture through the centuries. It is difficult to recommend one above the other. Remarkable Trees has more elegant production values—with images drawn from the extensive archive of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, where the book’s authors are tree specialists—but Max Adams, a teacher of woodland histories, has authored several books on the subject and the photographs in his study are often breathtaking.

With both books granting each of their chosen tree species its own succinct essay, there are surprisingly few overlaps, although both include the baobab, that characteristic ‘upside-down’ tree of the African savannah. Mr Adams’s photograph captures its extraordinary shape, but it is the other authors who explain why its disproportionately large trunk is ‘an evolutionary marvel’, allowing the tree to store water and survive in the arid landscapes in which it grows.

In a section on tree wonders of the world, Remarkable Trees conveys the almost terrifying majesty of the giant redwoods of California, which can live for more than 3,000 years. An individual named General Sherman, residing in Sequoia National Park, is, at 275ft high and 103ft in girth, Earth’s largest living organism.

‘The fascination is the unfamiliar, such as dragon’s blood trees’

At the other end of the size spectrum, the sago palm only lives in the wild for a dozen years, reaching 33ft high. Yet it’s among the oldest tree food sources for people in the tropics. Naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace collected sago cakes on a trip to New Guinea in 1869 and, as proof of their long storage life, some discoloured examples still reside in the Kew collection today. Contrastingly, the fan-like durian, dubbed the ‘king of fruits’ in its native South-East Asia, divides opinion between those who