Volume 54, Number 2 · February 15, 2007
What Is a Tree?
By Tim Flannery
The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter
by Colin Tudge
Crown, 459 pp., $27.95
The Plant-Book: A Portable Dictionary of the Vascular Plants, Second Edition
by D.J. Mabberley
Cambridge University Press, 858 pp., $85.00
Animal, mineral, or vegetable? Whenever our parents bundled us into the car for a long journey my sisters and I kept ourselves occupied with that guessing game. At its heart is the puzzle of how things should be classified, the more ambiguous the better. My inventive youngest sister came up with 'a cow's moo.' Through its astonishing revelations about what is related to what in the plant world, Colin Tudge's The Tree reawakens the pleasure of those childish games. But The Tree is a far deeper book than this might suggest, for its author has a remarkable ability to ask fundamental questions about trees and their world—questions that, much to our detriment, most of us stopped asking as we grew up.
Review, 3224 words
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