Remember the ‘Plant a Tree in ’73’ campaign? Forty years on, has anyone inquired into what happened to all those trees and how many are still alive? Since then, planting amenity trees has grown into an industry, and turns out to have its down sides. One is that little trees are imported in industrial quantities from other countries, as if they were cars or tins of paint, and inevitably bring with them foreign pests and diseases which destroy established trees. Globalisation of tree diseases has overtaken climate change and too many deer to become the number one threat to the world’s trees and forests.
This book, by a scientific journalist, is a miscellany of what people, especially Americans, think about trees and the virtues that they ascribe to them. Insofar as it has a theme, it is a biography of David Milarch, a colourful and mystical American nurseryman with a passion for cloning (taking cuttings of) special trees — either ‘champion’ (specially big) trees, or very old trees, or in some other way ‘good’ individuals.
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