Ten fathoms deep below the Gulf of Mexico, and several miles off the coast of Alabama, lies a submerged cypress forest sprouting with sea anemones. More than 60,000 years old, the cypress trees – some of them 6ft in diameter – were buried in sediments for millennia before they were exposed in 2004 when waves driven by Hurricane Ivan scoured the sea floor. “Although the trees were dead, they were still standing in place,” writes Daniel Lewis in his global arboreal odyssey, Twelve Trees. Cypress samples brought to the surface could offer clues to the effects of climate on wood from that long-ago era, he explains. But soon after the discovery of the watery forest, salvage companies sought permits to dig up the ancient logs and turn them into furniture.
For much of humanity’s history, trees have been perceived as wondrous beings: we admire them, revere them and conjure dryads from their innards. But for corporations, they’re commodities: a source of timber, rubber, fuel, toilet paper, and the absorbent fluff found inside nappies. They’re also sources of food, medicine, shade and vital habitat for birds, insects and small mammals, as well as lichens, mosses, and ferns. Most importantly, global forests absorb approximately 7.6bn tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, sequestering it in their roots, leaves, branches and trunks. A recent paper in Nature suggests that restoring and protecting fragmented forests could, over time, remove an additional 226 gigatonnes of planet-heating carbon (830 gigatonnes of CO2) from the atmosphere. Yet forests burn at a rate of 22,000 sq ft (2,000 sq metres) per minute in the Amazon, Lewis writes; in Central Africa, 10m acres (4m hectares) of trees disappear every year.
Lewis, an environmental historian at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, considers our urge to both conserve and consume. His journey takes him around the world to ponder the beauty of 12 tree species, mostly the magnificent and often vulnerable, including redwood, sandalwood, baobab and ebony (though humble bonsai trees get a brief nod). In Cameroon, for example, Lewis contemplates the Central African forest ebony, Diospyros crassiflora. Its jet-black heartwood is highly prized, used to craft piano keys, guitars, door knobs and pool cues. Ebony faces threats including illegal logging and conversion of forests into grazing land or palm oil and rubber plantations. Lewis highlights an initiative to transform the growth and harvesting of ebony in Cameroon, led by Taylor Guitars, supplier to – yes – Taylor Swift.
In 2011, Taylor Guitars co-founder Bob Taylor bought a dilapidated ebony mill in Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé and refurbished it to supply wood for his instruments. Five years later, the company partnered with the Congo Basin Institute in Yaoundé to develop ebony tree nurseries and a community-based planting programme. The company also replants ebony and fruit trees that buffer Cameroon’s Dja reserve, a Unesco world heritage site. In 2022, Lewis reports, 27,810 trees were planted.
Trees don’t live in isolation: they are important habitats for myriad plants and animals. Sequoia sempervirens, the redwood that grows in a band along the Pacific coast of North America, can reach heights of more than 100 metres. High in its canopy are soil pockets that support crickets, beetles, molluscs, earthworms and amphibians, including a wandering, skydiving salamander, Aneides vagrans. Coast redwoods can live for 2,000 years. The olive tree, though rather shorter, can also reach an impressive age: one tree in the “Noah” olive grove in Bchaaleh (northern Lebanon) was recently carbon-dated to more than 1,000 years old.
Although Lewis sometimes veers into extraneous detail, he charms with occasional flights of ecstasy, as when he encounters the mighty ceiba tree, Ceiba pentandra, in Manú national park, a haven of terrestrial biodiversity in south-western Peru – “the most gigantic tree I have ever seen … with enormous buttress roots radiating out in all directions.” He touches the rough bark, circumnavigates the tree, communes with it, climbs into its branches, “trying to bring its world more fully into my own.”
A compelling global exploration of nature and survival as seen via a dozen species of trees, offering “extensive insight into the ways in which humans and trees are interconnected” (BookPage), revealing the challenges facing our planet and how scientists are working urgently to save our forests and our future. The world today is undergoing the most rapid environmental transformation in human history—from climate change to deforestation. Scientists, ethnobotanists, indigenous peoples, and collectives of all kinds are closely studying trees and their biology to understand how and why trees function individually and collectively in the ways they do.
In Twelve Trees, Daniel Lewis, curator and historian at one of the world’s most renowned research libraries, travels the world to learn about these trees in their habitats. Lewis takes us on a sweeping journey to plant breeding labs, botanical gardens, research facilities, deep inside museum collections, to the tops of tall trees, underwater, and around the Earth, journeying into the deserts of the American west and the deep jungles of Peru, to offer a globe-spanning perspective on the crucial impact trees have on our entire planet. When a once-common tree goes extinct in the wild but survives in a botanical garden, what happens next? How can scientists reconstruct lost genomes and habitats? How does a tree store thousands of gallons of water, or offer up perfectly preserved insects from millions of years ago, or root itself in muddy swamps and remain standing? How does a 5,000-year-old tree manage to live, and what can we learn from it? And how can science account for the survival of one species at the expense of others?
Twelve Trees “brims with wonder, appreciation, and even some small hope” (Booklist) and is an awe-inspiring story of our world, its past, and its future. Note—species include: The Lost Tree of Easter Island (Sophora toromiro), The coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), Hymenaea protera [a fossil tree], The Longleaf pine (Pinus palustris), East Indian sandalwood (Santanum album), The Bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva), West African ebony (Diospyros crassiflora), The Tasmanian blue gum eucalyptus (Eucalyptus globulus), Olive tree (Olea europaea), Baobab (Adansonia digitata), the kapok tree (Ceiba pentandra), The bald cypress (Taxodium distichum).
NPR’s Ari Shapiro talks with writer Daniel Lewis about his new book, Twelve Trees, which zeroes in on a different tree species in each chapter. There are some 73,000 species of trees on Earth, according to one recent estimate. The writer Daniel Lewis zeroed in on a tiny fraction of them for his new book, “Twelve Trees.” Each chapter is one species. And he makes the case that, taken together, they’re a bit like a family, where each has its own role to play with its own personality traits.
So you get the quiet cousin. You get the rowdy daughter, the bookish aunt, you know, the brash sister. And so they lead different lives, but they all have a treeness about them that they have in common, I suppose, is one way to think about it. These portraits don’t just focus on biology and ecology. They also dig into culture and myths around species like the blue gum eucalyptus or the olive tree. And Daniel Lewis told me learning about these plants has helped him better understand human concerns. For example, the toromiro is a tree that’s been displaced from its homeland.
The toromiro is the tree – the lost tree of Easter Island, and it’s disappeared from its homeland. And, you know, everything has a – everything is from somewhere else, is one of my arguments about trees. And all of these trees have evolved in place, but they’ve also come from other places. Trees are more mobile than you might think. You know, they’re blown by seeds. They’re carried by water, and they eventually land in a place where they become established. And a tree like the toromiro on Easter Island has managed to go extinct on the island, but it survives only in botanic gardens around the world. And so the fact that it’s an expat of sorts has given it kind of a different weight. And there’s been an attempt to get it to regrow on Rapa Nui, as Easter Island is more properly called. And the fact that it’s been in isolation from its homeland means that it’s been far from home for a long time. So there’s a notion of place that’s struck through all of these trees.
You know, when I started reading the book, I was sitting at home on my couch, and I kind of paused, and I looked around me and I started counting the trees that I could see just from where I was sitting. And there was a towering oak outside my window, a fiddle-leaf fig in a pot, a dogwood in my yard. I saw them differently, even though I see them every day. How do you hope the book changes the way that readers view trees?
I think I really want people to understand a well-established notion, but differently. So simply put, the natural world needs our attentions, plural. You know, and that’s an evergreen notion, to use a tree term. But it’s not just to save the trees. It really is to save ourselves – I mean, I think we’ve got a lot of skin in the game – through reflection and poetry and patience with ourselves and, you know – and also not neglecting the importance of taking appropriate scientific action. I want people to understand that, you know, the salvation of trees can be our salvation.
As you’re so aware, trees are mythic. Trees are metaphorical. Trees are cultural. And they are also the subject of scientific study. And this is a book that is deeply grounded in science but doesn’t ignore the mythic and the metaphorical and the cultural. How did you thread that needle?
I think it’s hard to miss the sensory elements of trees if you just take a moment to pay attention. And so it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to point out that they have smells. They have sounds. They are sensory creatures in a sense. They – you can’t miss their extravagance in some ways. I think in that moment, poetry emerges because then we can start thinking about bigger things. One of the throughlines of the book is climate change. And so to differing degrees, trees are able to respond. And the classic example are these fungi that they found in the coast redwoods that seem to thrive in drier climates. And one of the things they’ve done with the coast redwood is they’ve tried planting it at the very outer limits of its established range in the Pacific Northwest to see if they can get them to grow in drier regions, and indeed they can. And so to try to get these trees to grow through the actions of humans in areas where climate is having an effect is encouraging, because now we see that these trees can grow where it’s drier, they can grow where it’s at different altitudes. And so the human hand on the scale sometimes has to be gentle, in a way, to get these things to come to life.
Each of the species in this book tells a different story. What story do you hope they tell collectively when you take them as a whole?
I want people to understand that trees and people have far more in common than we might imagine, even though we look different, you know, because humans are messy, and they’re noble, and they confront stresses of many different kinds, you know? And they’re graceful, or they’re invasive. And, you know, humans can be selfless. And, you know, trees do work in concert with each other. And I think humans can work in concert with each other as well. So I think that these 12 trees each say something about ourselves, you know, because trees are not just about trees. They’re about many other things. And we live among them, and they live among us. So I think we have an obligation to understand them better.
Source: NPR
