The British Museum contains more about trees than one might expect: trees in paintings, drawings, sculpture, and all kinds of small artefacts of wood and bark. Frances Carey, sometime Deputy Keeper of Prints and Drawings, discusses trees as viewed through the collections. She deals not with trees themselves — for that one goes to the Natural History Museum and Kew Gardens — but with trees as interpreted (or misinterpreted) by botanical illustrators, divines, etchers, literary writers, medallists, metaphorists, mythologists, painters, poets, politicians and sculptors, on a worldwide scale going back to the Neolithic if not beyond.
Discussions of people’s varied reactions to trees are followed by an ‘Arboretum’: 24 chapters each dealing with one genus of tree. (Family trees and Trees of Knowledge appear separately.) Presumably these are chosen from those best represented in the museum’s collections. The final chapter is on the past and future of forests — but not trees outside forests which, as the pictures show, form most of the book’s subject-matter.
This book, being a product of the processes that established the museum’s collections, is a miscellany: a miscellany of fascinating thoughts, objects and illustrations.
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