David George Haskell

This is the best book about a guy staring at the same spot on the ground for a year that you could possibly imagine.

That's honestly not an inaccurate description. The author picked out a small patch of ground in an old-growth forest in Tennessee -- he refers to it as "the mandala" by analogy with Buddhist sandpaintings meant to represent the cosmos in miniature -- and returned to it regularly over the course of a year, examining it closely and musing on what he found there. And those show more musings are fantastic, a thoughtful, poetic blending of science, philosophy, and human emotion that illuminates the natural world and reflects on our place in it in a way that feels to me utterly and profoundly right. It's also full of lots and lots and lots of insights and facts about various plants, animals, and fungi that leave me repeatedly exclaiming "How did I never know this before?!"

Rating: 5/5. I think that's actually the first book this year that I've given the full 5 out of 5 to, so that should tell you something about just how highly I think of it. show less

For sure, I’d anticipated that this exploration of the connections and communications between trees and everything else on the planet would be interesting and informative. But I hadn’t anticipated that it would also be so moving.

As both observer and participant, Haskell examines a dozen species of trees in a dozen locations* around the world, and captures the results in gentle, evocative essays that have botanical (and zoological!) characters and settings as fascinating as any fiction. show more (*He gives the GPS coordinates for each tree's location, and I googled most of them.) The content is both scientific and philosophical, and brought to mind other collections by naturalist essayists that I’ve loved, for example Bernd Heinrich, Rowan Jacobsen, Michael Pollan and Taras Grescoe. Lovely. show less

John Muir said, "When we try and pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." Haskell's book is about how trees serve as a marvelous nexus that connects individual humans to one another and to other denizens of nature. (Haskell is adamant that humans and our machines not be thought of as "non-natural" or "outside of nature".) It builds upon themes from his prior book, The Forest Unseen, but indulges in some much more poetic writing that serves his show more purpose of reminding us of our attachments to all around us. For me, personally, Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees was a more profound awakening. But had I not run across that book first, it might have been The Song of Trees that opened my eyes to a greater awareness of the truth Muir wrote. show less

Haskell writes beautifully about trees. Each chapter focuses on one tree that he has studied, and starts with the aural environment around the tree - the sounds of rain on leaves in the rainforest, or waves on the coast, or subways rumbling under the New York City sidewalks. From there, he branches out to talk about how trees are a nexus in the interconnectedness of everyone and everything on earth, from the fungi who have a symbiotic relationship with them to the aborigines whose culture show more revolves around them to the farmers who cultivate them to the city-dwellers who sit in their shade. And from there, he expands even farther to discussions of environmentalism, ecological morality, climate change, racism, war, peace, and ultimately, connections between human beings. I learned a lot of interesting things about trees (turns out, palm trees are utterly fascinating), but also really appreciated the macrocosmic view of the role trees play in our physical and cultural worlds. show less