The Tree Collectors

"The Japanese practice of forest bathing, shinrin-yoku, changes the levels of stress and pleasure hormones in the body, decreasing cortisol and increasing serotonin. Tree collectors know this. And if being around one tree feels good, their thinking goes, imagine how a hundred trees would feel. In her first botanical nonfiction in more than a decade, Amy Stewart brings us on a captivating tour of tree collectors around the world asking: what drives one to collect something as enormous, majestic, and deeply-rooted as a tree? In her gentle, intimate, slyly humorous way, Stewart brings these people to life, organizing their stories into categories. There are the community builders--like Shyam Sunder Paliwal who, after the death of his daughter, began a movement in his Rajasthan village to plant 111 trees whenever a girl was born--who do the remarkable work of knitting people together under an arboreal canopy. There are seekers who have taken their passion for trees around the world, or even into space. There are visionaries--the former poet laureate, W.S. Merwin, who planted a tree a day for over three decades, until he had turned a barren estate into a palm sanctuary. And there are healers--like Joe Hamilton, who plants trees on land passed down to him by his formerly enslaved great-grandfather--who have found a way to heal their own lives, the lives of others, or even wounds of the past, by planting trees"--