Remarkable Trees

Let nature fill your senses

Recently, I found Meetings with Remarkable Trees by Thomas Pakenham in my Little Free Library. The author took pictures of, and wrote about, trees throughout the United Kingdom that were remarkable for their age, girth, height, or oddity. Not only that, but I had just read Lab Girl which amazed me with tree research. Everything was conspiring to force me into writing about remarkable trees.

I’ve always been a city girl. I preferred walking on a sidewalk than a forest path. But one day, I discovered a tree. My husband and I were house hunting, and we were drawn to a magnificent Victorian house. Even more than the house, though, I was drawn to a huge, old maple tree. It was calling out (not really, but this is what I imagined): “Buy the house! Save me from death by chainsaw!” We didn’t buy the house, but we often walk by it to check up on the tree.

There are tree lovers (or tree huggers) and the kind of people who will engage in lengthy litigation because they demand that a neighbor removes trees that block their view or drop leaves on their property - or sneak onto the neighbor’s property to cut down said trees. I sympathize with people who buy a house with a view only to have the view disappear, but which was there first? The tree which, in the way of trees, was bound to grow or the objecting neighbor? When my extended family sold the family house in Seattle, they created a covenant protecting certain specimen trees on the property. I don’t imagine we have any legal recourse if an owner cuts down any of the trees, but every time I am in the area, I drive by to check up on them. Unfortunately, we couldn’t do anything about the buyers subdividing the property and building a new house in the area where the blackberry and raspberry canes were!

The city of Seattle made a Tree Canopy study in 2016. They found that there were only 6,338 trees with a trunk diameter of 30 inches or greater left in the city. At that time, the citywide tree cover was 28.6%. The 2021 Tree Canopy Assessment showed a decline from 28.6% to 28.1% in 2021, a loss of 255 acres. The city has goal of 30% coverage by 2037. Would (wood?) that it be so.

I hope that if you are a tree lover/hugger, if you care about the interconnectedness of humans and nature, if you are concerned with protecting our natural resources, you will read some of these books. And if you have never felt the pull of remarkable trees, read these books and you will look at trees in a new way.

In light of some recent news concerning the dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service, I would like to draw your attention to The big burn : Teddy Roosevelt and the fire that saved America by Timothy Egan. This is the story of a huge fire that moved through national forests in Washington, Idaho, and Montana, and the forest rangers aided by nearly ten thousand men who attempted to fight the fires. Equally dramatic, though, is the story of President Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, and the creation of the U.S. Forest Service. The book’s publisher wrote: “Pioneering the notion of conservation, Roosevelt and Pinchot did nothing less than create the idea of public land as our national treasure, owned by every citizen.” I will let that sit with you.

Meetings with Remarkable Trees by Thomas Pakenham

The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben - the illustrated edition, of course!

Lab girl by Hope Jahren. “A beautifully written memoir about the life of a woman in science, a brilliant friendship, and the profundity of trees. Terrific.”—Barack Obama

The overstory : a novel by Richard Powers. “The best novel ever written about trees, and really just one of the best novels, period.” ―Ann Patchett