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Amy Stewart is the best-selling author of “Wicked Plants,” “The Drunken Botanist,” and several other nonfiction works about the natural world. Her new book is “The Tree Collectors,” a tribute to people whose arboreal obsessions have beautified the world.
‘The Sakura Obsession’ by Naoko Abe (2019)
I was astonished to learn that the great majority of cherry trees in Japan are just one variety, and that many rare varieties that existed in past centuries have been lost. Naoko Abe, a journalist, gained access to a rich archive that told the story of how a passionate English gardener helped save many of them from extinction a century ago. It’s a remarkable story of international friendships. Buy it here.
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‘Tom Lake’ by Ann Patchett (2023)
This was the best novel I read last year. Everything Patchett writes is luscious and gorgeous, but this book earns extra points from me because its story, about a mother sharing recollections with her adult daughters of a past romance, takes place on a Michigan cherry farm. Buy it here.
‘Eliza Scidmore’ by Diana P. Parsell (2023)
I’m going to stay with cherry trees for a moment, because this biography tells the story of a groundbreaking 19th-century journalist and world traveler who wrote books on Alaska, Japan, China, and India, then worked tirelessly to bring cherry trees to Washington, D.C. Buy it here.
‘Abundant Beauty’ by Marianne North (2011)
Would you like more tales of adventurous women? Botanical artist Marianne North, a friend of Charles Darwin’s, traveled the world in the second half of the 19th century and made extraordinary paintings of the plants she saw. She kept a journal, and the most thrilling excerpts from her travels are included here. Buy it here.
‘Frank N. Meyer: Plant Hunter in Asia’ by Isabel Shipley Cunningham (1984)
Speaking of daring adventures: At the beginning of the 20th century, the man who brought us the Meyer lemon traveled all over Asia, to his great peril, in search of new food crops. Buy it here.
‘The Ghost Forest’ by Greg King (2023)
King, a former journalist who became a conservation activist, discovered a trove of historical records revealing that early efforts to save California’s giant redwoods were really a front for industrialists who wished to raze them. It’s a shocking and entirely unexpected story. King, with his generations-long connection to the redwood forests, is the perfect person to tell the tale. Buy it here.
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