100 books like We Planted a Tree

Here’s a book to sample and savor again and again!

I loved the combination of poetry bolstered with clear, well-sourced nonfiction text on every single spread. This tribute song to forests is based on groundbreaking work about how trees create communities and sustain the places where they grow.

While placing trees in the context of the “wood wide web,” this book transports us to a glorious range of places. Beeches in Germany, an elm tree in Central Park, tualang saplings in Malaysia, kapoks in Brazil, silver birch in China, diverse forests in Colorado—all of it brings us closer to the wisdom of trees in the places we each call home.  

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.

This book by my friend and colleague Liz Garton Scanlon really felt as if it were speaking to my own book.

It starts out as the story of a man living all alone in a creaky house on top of a hill—then there’s that wind, and young Kate at the bottom of the hill! The text has a wonderful, irregular rhythm that flutters words around in the mind the way the wind lifts a leaf or bangs a shutter.

Look at the text leaping over a single dramatic wordless spread to create the final turn of this story. Nice afterword offers additional information and perspective on the marvels of trees.  

I loved the musicality of this book and its bilingual construction.

I appreciated the centering of the Indigenous languages historically known as Thompson River and Coast Salish. It challenged me to look into the glossary in the back, to pore over the pronunciation guides, to lose myself briefly in the representation of unfamiliar, beautiful sounds while knowing they mean the world to those who hold them dear.

English translations (loon or earth or snake, or even the questions in the refrain) are placed within glancing reach in small print and the first-person narrative is a journey through particular, beloved landscapes of the Pacific Northwest.

I love this book because it has everything I want to see in a book about trees: parts of a tree, beautiful illustrations of their root systems and canopies, pictures of animals that live in the trees, and descriptions of how trees defend themselves. It is brimming with science but is written in a friendly way that doesn’t make me feel like I’m sitting in a lecture. The book explains how trees sense the world around them and how animals like monkeys, squirrels and birds disperse tree seeds.

My favorite part is the section on tree habitats, which includes tropical rain forest, temperate rain forest, swamp forest and snow forest, complete with how each habitat is structured and who lives there. I feel like I’m in an immersive museum exhibit when I read this book.

I discovered Wohlleben’s book when I was writing about my own emergent relationship with trees. I was learning to think with quantum field theory and new materialism, and very conscious of the way some of my writing was sounding like I was teetering on the edge of madness.

Wohlleben offered me insights into my own relations with trees, and he enabled me to articulate not only my love of trees but the Earth’s dependence on them as they grow together in old-growth forests. At the same time, Wohlleben makes horribly clear the motivation of politicians globally to destroy old-growth forests out of their own ignorance and greed, intensified by the loggers who lie to them and hide the truth from them. 

We think the forest is made up of trees, but this book shows us how some trees are connected underground by mycorrhizal fungi. I love trees, but we have to give the little guys some credit too, and sometimes ‘the little guys,’ i.e., underground fungi, are not so little. Fungi to the rescue!

I like how this book shows that in the case of Douglas fir trees and some other species, nutrients can travel between trees and support new tree seedlings as they grow in the shadow of giant neighboring trees, waiting for their turn to soak up the sunlight. I think of this book as a children’s version of Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard. 

A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America by author and naturalist Donald Culross Peattie is probably the very best book on trees that I have ever read. I used this book (and also his book on Western trees) as a marvelous resource when I was working on my books. 

I learned many a new thing from this book, things I could not find in books written by botanists or horticulturists. This in large part is because Peattie was first and foremost, a naturalist. He tells the reader things that others didn’t bother to mention (for example, that with Honeylocust trees, each branch is of only one sex). The author also has a wonderful way of writing that makes the text come alive…always interesting.  As a naturalist, Peattie looks at the whole picture; one of the few writers about trees who was also a dedicated ecologist. A… show more.

There are novels based on this book, which are also enthralling. Having been an academic all my life, I was immediately captured by Simard’s daring struggle to tell the truth that goes against the established scientific order. She took me on her own adventure to understand the sociality of trees. I read it during the COVID pandemic when pretty much the only beings I related to were trees in my nearby Botanic Garden.

There was an oak tree I talked to every day, and lying in its shelter, I was protected by it. Later, I came to love an Angophora costata, who loved me right back. Simard gave me insights into the possibility of such relationality and its vital importance to the world’s future.

Soon to be a musical, this enchanting story is about an eleven-year-old girl who doesn’t know she can sing until she gets to know an oak tree in her garden, Annie Oakly, who becomes her best friend and is actually a tree spirit. As the story unfolds, and Emma is confronted with family troubles, she learns of her own vital role in saving the trees; Emma must sing! 

I’m recommending this book because of my own love for both trees and music. In fact, I often sing to the redwoods where I live and sometimes imagine they are singing along with their rustling squeaks and creaks. The author tells a story grounded in everyday problems, such as living with a grandmother with dementia, while bringing the fantastical and magical world of nature vividly alive.