Loving Trees

I LOVE TREES. Presumbaly most people do, like music and food. I planted about fifty saplings nineteen years ago on my property where my newly built house stood,in a vast barren construction landscape, with only crabgrass and rocks. Through the years I have lovingly watched them grow, and am richly rewarded today and for the rest of my life by living in a beautiful, home grown forest. I am tolerant, nay, accepting of volunteer growth,, brush and tree. Only if necessary do I intervene. Two or three years ago a volutneer tree was growing beautifully, seven feet tall already, but much too close to my house. It needed to be moved. I tried to, a neighbor tree - lover and I transplanted it, but failed. It immediately looked droopy, and never recovered, despite my best, desperate attempts to save it. Despondently I watched it dying little by little, every day, as my heart broke and sank. I wrote an essay about it; "Loving A Dying Tree", published on this site. At the dawn of human neolithic civilization it is estimated that there were roughly seven trillion trees on planet Earth. Now, we humans have cut that number in half. WE need to reverse this trend, and indeed are beginning to do so. Large reforestation projects all over the world are taking root, so to speak. Of the millions of tree lovers on Earth, among the most fervant is Daniel Lewis, whose new book "Twelve Trees: The Deep Roots of Our Future", will inspire you and warm your heart. Lewis himself is a bibliophile librarian researcher who has travelled all over the world visiting, admiring, and researching trees of every conceivable variety. Latest estimates are that there are roughly seventy three thousand "varieties" or species, of trees in the world. Obviously there are still undiscovered species, and the exact number is far from being known.It is to be hoped that humanity will at length develop an accurate, comprehensive knowledge of all species of trees, past and present, before and rather than exterminating all life on Earth. Science is still learning much about trees, how they live, function, and reproduce, among other questions. It turns out that we know far less about trees than we thought, like most areas of knowledge. In "Twelve Trees", Daniel Lewis focuses on twelve specific species of trees, including a species that is extinct on its native Easter Island, but is alive in captivity in zoololigical preserves. Attempts are being made to reintroduce it into its native island habitat, without much success so far. Then, he has chapters on several varieties of oak and pine tree, among others. Each tree was selected for the book because of some dramatic aspect of its existence, and because the problems and circumstances for them is highly indicative of and symbolic of circumstances and threats facing trees all over the world. Weaving together these twelve chapters on twelve different tree species into a narrative which includes the whole world and every tree in it, Lewis educates us about what we know, what we need to learn, and how we can save the planet by reforesting it. Trees have personalities, communities, and communication. Any day now we're likely to find out that they have churches and baseball teams. Two of the best pieces of advice you'll get all day are: read this book, and plant a tree. At least one.