100 books like The Long, Long Life of Trees

This book combines the best in travel writing with history, art, and food. Attlee takes the readers through Italy, from Lake Garda’s lemon houses and the gardens of Tuscan villas to the scented bergamot groves in Calabria to a marmalade kitchen in Sicily. Along the way, we learn about the “garden poem,” a genre of poetry practiced in the 10th and 11th centuries by Islamic poets living in Sicily. The book also includes recipes for a chocolate tart from Capri, a lamb stew from a 13th-century Arabic cookbook, candied peels, and drinks using the abundant variety of citrus available in Italy. It’s a book for all the senses, a great read for gardeners during the winter months.

This little book is a thing of beauty and I just find it spell-binding. Talented artist and printmaker Pia Östlund describes how she makes a curious discovery: a set of prints in the library of Chelsea Physic Garden in London. This leads her to rediscover the lost technique of nature-printing, while her co-author Simon Prett explores the history of this little-known art. Little snippets about fern hunting and facsimiles of fern fronds and seaweeds make this irresistible – the kind of book I’d dip into on a lazy Saturday morning over coffee, then struggle to dip back out of!  

I grew up in a house choked with books – falling out of the shelves and piling onto the floor. I developed a curious habit as a child: I would sniff the pages of every book I picked up. Some smell old, like vanilla and time, I discovered; others smell fresh, like rain after a drought. Well, Glasshouse Greenhouse smells so good it’s worth buying for its perfume alone! Seriously though, this is a visual treat, packed full of emerald-green plantscapes on every page. The authors start their journey around the world’s glasshouses just metres from where I sit typing these words at my place of work, Oxford Botanic Garden. To me, this makes it particularly special. 

This is a satisfyingly large tome with sumptuous prints and illustrations from ancient texts, gardens, and herbals that spill out on every page and give it a sort of timelessness. Flicking through it now, the page that opened in front of me features a facsimile of a 1748 book, complete with foxing; it is so real I could reach out and touch it. This is something I’d put on top of the coffee table book pile and feel happier just to know it’s there, replete with its botanical treasure. 

This story, with wonderful illustrations, is a different way to believe in yourself. A girl wants a pet for her birthday—a tree! Her parents reluctantly give in. She finds a little tree, names it Fido, puts it in a pot and takes it everywhere in her wagon. A neighbor kid says his cat is a real pet. When the tree is too big for her wagon, her dad helps her plant it in her yard. Now she has a tree she can climb, sit in and read books, surrounded by birds! She says, “A tree is everyone’s friend.” 

Like me, when he was a kid, Paul was told he couldn’t write. He got an F, with the note: “Get a tutor.”

I like this book because, while drawing on a number of other sources on this theme, it introduces us, in relatively few words per chapter, to the importance of a range of tree species to people, in a great variety of ways. 

Selecting 80 species - from England’s ‘London Plane’ to the ‘Sugar Maple’ of Canada - the book takes us on a journey around the world, by geographical region, summarizing key botanical information about each one and giving us examples of its significance or uses, past and/or present, often surprising or little known.

Each chapter has been beautifully illustrated by Lucille Clerk.

This was the book that made me look again at trees, seeing them for the incredible organisms that they are. Deakin goes on an amazing adventure from Suffolk to Kazakhstan, Australia, and beyond, trying to get to the heart of why wood and trees have such profound meaning for us. If you like Wildwood, you could also try Waterlog, in which he wild-swims his way through the British Isles. He’s the perfect companion for the armchair adventurer, and a very genial writer.

Kiernan is, without question, one of the best practitioners of dark weird fiction working today. I’ve been reading their work almost since I started writing myself and will happily – and gratefully – admit to the early influence on my own writing. While their short stories always held a greater attraction for me personally, The Red Tree is a powerful and ambitious novel that brings together everything I love about their work. Sarah Crowe is burned-out writer fleeing from all her life contains, including herself, and the old, isolated farmhouse chosen as a refuge proves to be precisely the opposite. There are stories nested within stories, autobiography threaded through metafiction, dread mingled with wonder, and a satisfying ambiguity that resists a neat resolution. 

A visionary book that sees trees and humankind working together for mutual benefit. Steering clear of both the romanticized image of untouched nature as well as greedy exploitation of natural resources it impressively demonstrates how humans and forests have always thrived from each other. It was this highly positive concept of coexistence with nature that really inspires me to this day.

Trees and us. We’re bound together from breath to shelter and beyond, bound together in every way. That’s the truth of this poem in words and pictures from author-illustrator Corinna Luyken.

The words are as delicate as the rustle of leaves but they’re also completely centered on the child reader. Even the punctuation is placed with care, adding pause and breath, mediating the transition from shade to light, as if the words and their accessories were meant to float off the page as the text is read out loud.