The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsessions
by Amy Stewart New York: Random House, 2024. $32.00 list $20.99 Amazon
I have been a fan of Amy Stewart’s writings for many years. A couple of notable books come to mind: “Flower Confidential” (2007), about the cut-flower industry and plant breeders looking for that perfect flower—a blue rose, perhaps? and “The Drunken Botanist” (2013), a survey of the numerous plants worldwide that have been fermented and concocted over the centuries into alcoholic drinks—just check them out at your local liquor store and you’ll find all had their origins as plants.
Now comes a new book from Stewart, “The Tree Collectors” (Random House, 2024), containing profiles of some 50 people who have obsessively bonded with trees in multiple and varied ways. Stewart illustrates the book with her watercolor portraits of these extraordinary people and the trees, fruits, and flowers they obsess over. In brief, you’ll meet a world of enthusiasts, curators, ecologists, preservationists, educators, artists and more who will introduce you to plant societies and a community of “collectors” whose passions are without bounds.
She covers a broad swath of tree aficionados: a topiarist (Mike Gibson), now in South Carolina, who originally began creating topiaries in Ohio and learned of the abstract art created by Pearl Fryar in Bishopville, South Carolina, whose work “closely resembled a Picasso or Henry Moore sculpture than clipped boxwoods.” Gibson helped restore the Fryar garden and now teaches nearby in Columbia.
In “The Tree Collectors” you will meet bonsai artists; rare fruit trees in Brazil; a camellia preservationist in Louisiana; pine cone, seed, leaf, and wood collectors; an arboretum at a nursing home for the chronic mentally ill in Poland; an expatriate’s arboretum in Chollipo, South Korea; zone pushers of tropical plants in Idaho; an Arctic arborist in Greenland; holly, apple, ginkgo, and magnolia collectors; champion trees; and the oak trees given to Olympic gold medal winners in Germany in 1936 (Jesse Owens received four Quercus robur)—and some places these oaks were planted around the world and are still surviving.
The Pulitzer-winning poet, W. S. Merwin moved to Hawaii and eventually turned nineteen acres of land, hoping to return it to a native rainforest. Over three decades he planted hundreds of palms, at the rate of one a day. The rarest he acquired was Tahina spectabilis, native to Madagascar, a gift from a palm specialist at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Merwin is quoted as saying, “On the last day of the world, I would want to plant a tree.”
For the rock garden enthusiast Stewart writes of Far Reaches Botanical Conservancy in Washington, where Sue Milliken and Kelly Dodson operate a for-profit nursery and a non-profit conservancy, whose “broader purpose of the conservancy is to safeguard species under threat from human activity and climate change.”
I have one quibble about “The Tree Collectors” and that is the lack of an index. Coming from a household with a librarian, it’s not easy to find Dennis Wilson (the wood collector), or Tom Cox’s “Noah’s Ark of Plants” in Canton, Georgia; or even the arborist (Dave Muffly) at Steven Jobs’s Apple Computer campus in California, although admittedly the three are randomly listed in the contents. But without an index you wouldn’t know about the neem tree (Azidirachta indica) or the Baishanzu fir (Abies beshanzuensis).
Overall, “The Tree Collectors” is a worthy addition for your bookshelf. Like coin or stamp collectors, you’ll meet some geeky, obsessed, passionate, but also normal people—some on a lifelong pursuit. “I started to see that the life of a tree collector is filled with adventure and wonder. It is a life well lived,” Stewart writes.
And, yes, the pages of Stewart’s book are made of paper . . . from trees.
Bobby Ward Is a member of the Piedmont Chapter of NARGS and has been a NARGS member since 1990. He is the author and editor of several horticultural books, the most recent is a biography of the late J. C. Raulston, founder of the arboretum at North Carolina State University.