A few weeks ago, a friend told me he was coming over with a book that I absolutely had to read.  He showed up a few minutes later and launched immediately into a rapturous description of The Wild Trees. He wouldn’t even visit very long so that I could start reading right away.   I didn’t start reading right away and that’s a good thing – I had a test the next day and once I started reading, I couldn’t stop.

From the Institute for Redwood Ecology

The Wild Trees is about redwood research and the people that pioneered the field.  Until very recently, we had no idea what was up there and a lot of it is still a mystery.

I love popular science books, but I usually find them simply intellectually exciting and rarely get emotionally involved.  This book was different for a few reasons.  First of all, the scientists are portrayed as humans and the way their personal lives influence their professional lives (and vice versa) is a large part of the book.  So often scientists are portrayed as dull or unnaturally obsessed, but this book shows how very human we are – from the connections we have with our families, to breakups and sex, to the awe and wonder we feel when presented with something so incredible as a redwood.

And that’s the second reason this book is so different from the normal nonfiction I read: a lot of time was spent describing the trees, the forest, and the experience of climbing the trees so that their magnificence and beauty really came through.  By the end of the book, I was ready to sign up for a tree climbing class just so I could see for myself what was up there.

It was also kind of thrilling to have a sort of connection to these trees.  I work with a scientist who studies redwoods and he has cores from many of these trees.  To get a core, you use a special hollow drill to extract a bit of wood the size of a very, very long straw from a tree.  You can sand the straw flat to see the growth rings:

Redwood rings under a microscope

I don’t study redwoods now, but I learned all about dendrochronology, or tree ring science, with redwoods.  Tree rings are a fascinating archive of stress, climate, competition, and more – an autobiography of a tree, if you will.  The language may be hard to interpret, but the information is there.

Every tree that is cored is given a name and most of the time the names are dull (SP032, for example).  But redwoods are given names like Thor, Atlas, and Kronos.  I always gave the tree a personality I associated with that name as I counted and counted and counted (and counted and counted) the rings.  The Wild Trees describes the discovery of many of the trees whose cores I analyzed and what it was like to climb them, what fascinating communities live within their canopies, even human drama that occurred in their branches.  I feel honored and grateful to have learned to read the stories trees tell from such ancient and stately behemoths.