The Secret Life of Trees
�Everyone interested in the natural world will enjoy The Secret Life of Trees. I found myself reading out whole chunks to friends� The Times, Books of the Year What is a tree? As this celebration of the trees shows, they are our countryside; our ancestors descended from them; they gave us air to breathe. Yet while the stories of trees are as plentiful as leaves in a forest, they are rarely told. Here, Colin Tudge travels from his own back garden round the world to explore the beauty, variety and ingenuity of trees everywhere: from how they live so long to how they talk to each other and why they came to exist in the first place. Lyrical and evocative, this book will make everyone fall in love with the trees around them.
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Not sure this book knew what it wanted to be.
It succeeded at being a book about trees written by a zoologist who seems just as happy to talk about other living things.
First part does have tree history, right back through evolution, but it does seem to get snagged up in the greater story of the evolution of life.
The second part has at least as many mentions of beings in Orders that are not trees, as trees themselves.
Also wasn't really expecting the frequent listing of all the uses that humans put the various tree parts to, apparently there are lots and lots of different timber with different colours and patterns. This makes a bit more sense linked to the point made in the last chapter about a tree-based economy, but it's a long time between evidence and argument.
First and second parts could be a reference guide, if colour photos were added.
I think I'd excerpt into a separate paper the many mentions/discussions of the recategorization and renaming of various levels of trees and tree families (order, genus, etc), because it comes up a lot, and isn't necessarily helpful in keeping straight what a tree is, or how it relates to other trees.
I just needed a one time disclaimer that ‘this may be out of date in five years and won't match up with older sources based on the ongoing science.'
The author seems happy to list encounters with various trees, pleasant and unpleasant, which I think would have been suited better to a brief memoir of his traveling and encountering various trees in various parts of the world; I would have loved to read it.
Probably written with the understanding that people may dip in and out of the book, but it makes a fun fact less fun when I kept encountering them in duplicate.
I think part three was mostly what I thought this book would be, but even it reflects the problems listed above.
I will always be grateful for works written by scientists with last chapters that end with hopes, with suggestions for the future, but I'd rather it not be the only bright spot in a long DRY spell.
