Tree: A Life Story by David Suzuki and Wayne Grady.
Title: Tree: A Life Story.
Author: David Suzuki and Wayne Grady.
Genre: Non-fiction, ecology, biology, Dendrology, science, nature.
Country: Canada.
Language: English.
Publication Date: September, 2004.
Summary: A celebration in a “biography” of this extraordinary - and extraordinarily important - organism. A story that spans a millennium and includes a cast of millions, but focuses on a single tree, a Douglas fir, it describes in poetic detail the organism’s modest origins that begin with a dramatic burst of millions of microscopic grains of pollen. The authors recount the amazing characteristics of the species, how they reproduce, and how they receive from and offer nourishment to generations of other plants and animals. The tree’s pivotal role in making life possible for the creatures around it - including human beings - is lovingly explored. The richly detailed text and Robert Bateman’s original art pay tribute to this ubiquitous organism that is too often taken for granted.
My rating: 8/10.
My review:
♥ Two human beings, walking through the dense forest, will see the straight line of hemlocks, and one of them will make the observation that there must have been a nurse log there at one time. They will not know that the nurse log was once a giant Douglas-fir, born the year that Edward I became king of England, fallen the year of the Great Wall Street Crash, but they will feel an unaccustomed oneness with the Earth just the same. They will take that feeling home, and it will sustain them.