Thomas Pakenham's beautifully illustrated, bestselling book of tree portraits. With this astonishing collection, Thomas Pakenham produced a new kind of tree book. The arrangement owes little to conventional botany. The sixty trees are grouped according to their own strong personalities: Natives, Travellers, Shrines, Fantasies and Survivors. From the ancient native trees, many of which are huge and immeasurably old, to the exotic newcomers from Europe, the East and North America, MEETINGS WITH REMARKABLE TREES captures the history and beauty of these entrancing living structures. Common to all these trees is their power to inspire awe and wonder. This is a lovingly researched book, beautifully illustrated with colour photographs, engravings and maps - a moving testimonial to the Earth`s largest and oldest living structures.

A landmark volume celebrating the most remarkable trees on the planet, Pakenham takes readers on a voyage across four continents and introduces them to arbors of all shapes and sizes--dwarfs, giants, aliens, and monuments. Full-color photos.

Thomas Pakenham in search of the oldest, most unusual and most impressive trees of Southern Africa.

A celebration of the beauty, diversity, importance and sheer wonder of the most remarkable trees, with exquisite illustrations from the incomparable collections of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. More than 60,000 species of trees are found in an amazing variety of forms, sizes and habitats. Every tree has its own story and here are over 60, selected for their particular resonance and connection with humankind and representing most of the world's major zones and ecologies. In this compact edition, portraits that combine vivid cultural and historical narrative with a firm scientific grounding, the authors reveal the details of trees from around the world, both familiar and strange. We use timbers for building and creating, have discovered which tree fruits and seeds taste delicious, and which can kill or cure us, and which species can add colour and spirituality to our lives - from the timber of mahogany to the delights of chocolate and pomegranate, from the medicinal tea tree to the deadly manchineel, and from fragrant frankincense to the highly prized dragon's blood tree. Artists and botanists alike have been inspired by trees for centuries, and a varied and beautiful range of images from the unrivalled archive at Kew illustrate the stories, to create this enlightening and enchanting book.

The famed author of "The Boer War "and "Remarkable Trees of the World "presents some of the oldest, most unusual, and most impressive trees on the planet as he travels across Southern Africa and Madagascar. Thomas Pakenham, no stranger to Africa with his award-winning books "The Boer War "and "The Scramble for Africa," nor to remarkable trees with his bestselling "Remarkable Trees of the World," combines his two interests on safari in Southern Africa. His particular quarry is the rare, the giant, the very old, the extraordinary, or the simply beautiful--from a giant baobab and a prickly quiver tree in Namibia to a glorious jacaranda in South Africa and sesame bushes attacked by elephants in Botswana. He uncovers trees written about by the great explorers of the past, or associated with magic, folklore, or ritual. The narrative accompanying each image interweaves the stories of Pakenham's own journey--at some moments scaling trees to escape from enraged wildlife, while at others standing in awe before a particular tree, connected by some primitive, atavistic bond--with those of the trees themselves, imbuing each with personality and presence. The result is a beautifully crafted blend of botany and social history, the product of a brilliant photographer, an original mind, and a superlative writer.

"Here you will find not only some of Virginia's largest trees, including a newly discovered national champion overcup oak in Isle of Wight County, but also some of the state's oldest trees, including baldcypress trees over 800 years old in Southampton County and red cedars over 450 years old in Giles. You will find unique trees like a willow oak in which a tricycle is embedded, find specimens like the massive American beech in front of Sleepy Hollow Methodist Church in Falls Church, and outrageously shaped trees, like the water tupelos in the Cypress Bridge area of Southampton County. You will find trees associated with famous people and events, but you'll also find trees associated with ordinary people in extraordinary ways. Perhaps best of all, you'll learn about communities that have gone to great lengths to protect their trees and about places where the public can visit some of the best trees and "treescapes" in the state."--BOOK JACKET.

This "stunning journey through a country that is home to exhilarating natural wonders, and a scarring colonial past . . . makes breathtakingly clear the connection between nature and humanity, and offers a singular portrait of the complexities inherent to our ideas of identity, family, and love" (Refinery29). A chance discovery of letters written by her immigrant grandfather leads Jessica J. Lee to her ancestral homeland, Taiwan. There, she seeks his story while growing closer to the land he knew. Lee hikes mountains home to Formosan flamecrests, birds found nowhere else on earth, and swims in a lake of drowned cedars. She bikes flatlands where spoonbills alight by fish farms, and learns about a tree whose fruit can float in the ocean for years, awaiting landfall. Throughout, Lee unearths surprising parallels between the natural and human stories that have shaped her family and their beloved island. Joyously attentive to the natural world, Lee also turns a critical gaze upon colonialist explorers who mapped the land and named plants, relying on and often effacing the labor and knowledge of local communities. Two Trees Make a Forest is a genre–shattering book encompassing history, travel, nature, and memoir, an extraordinary narrative showing how geographical forces are interlaced with our family stories.