Trees are familiar and lovely signs of life for most people, including fruit trees, evergreens, and colorful maple trees in autumn. Sometimes they're so ubiquitous, we don't even notice them. Entice your readers with one of the world's most unusual, attention-grabbing trees: the dragon's blood tree. Explorers will learn about this strange tree, including the source of its name, where it's found, and its uses. Age-appropriate text covers important science concepts and vivid images take readers up-close to a tree they may never see in real life. Fact boxes and a graphic organizer enhance the narrative.

'The Blood Tree is a high-throttle journey through the realms of light and dark. It gives readers a glimpse into the angels that both safeguard and exploit humanity.'

For poet Tiana Clark, trees will never be just trees. They will also and always be a row of gallows from which Black bodies once swung. This is an image that she cannot escape, but one that she has learned to lean into as she delves into personal and public histories, explicating memories and muses around race, elegy, family, and faith by making and breaking forms as well as probing mythology, literary history, her own ancestry, and, yes, even Rihanna. I Can’t Talk About the Trees without the Blood, because Tiana cannot engage with the physical and psychic landscape of the South without seeing the braided trauma of the broken past—she will always see blood on the leaves.

An informative, richly illustrated book about eighty of the world’s most important and remarkable trees Our planet is home to some three trillion trees—roughly four hundred for every person on Earth. In Trees of Life, Max Adams selects, from sixty thousand extant species, eighty remarkable trees through which to celebrate the richness of humanity’s relationship with trees, woods, and forests. In a sequence of informative and beautifully illustrated portraits, divided between six thematic sections, Adams investigates the trees that human cultures have found most useful across the world and ages: trees that yield timber and other materials of immense practical value, trees that bear edible fruits and nuts, trees that deliver special culinary ingredients and traditions, and trees that give us dyes, essences, and medicines. In a section titled “Supertrees,” Adams considers trees that have played a pivotal role in maintaining natural and social communities, while a final section, “Trees for the Planet,” looks at a group of trees so valuable to humanity that they must be protected at all costs from loss. From the apple to the oak, the logwood to the breadfruit, and the paper mulberry to the Dahurian larch, these are trees that offer not merely shelter, timber, and fuel but also drugs, foods, and fibers. Trees of Life presents a plethora of fascinating stories about them.

The Complete Language of Trees is a comprehensive encyclopedia providing the meanings, powers, facts, and folklore for over 400 types of trees--now in a pocket-size edition for easy, on-the-go reference. Along with a stunning visual depiction, each entry provides the tree's scientific and common name, characteristics, and historic and hidden properties from mythology, legends, and folklore. Discover the lore of trees, including: Hackberry Tree - encourages someone to continuously do their best Manchineel Tree - it is so toxic that the smoke from a burning tree can cause blindness, and it is not even advised to inhale the air around the tree Bark from the Bird Cherry Tree was placed on doors during medieval times to ward off plague Washi paper is created from the inner bark of the Paper Mulberry Tree. Pando is a Quaking Aspen colony that is 108 acres wide (about the size of 83 football fields!). It is technically one tree. Imagine developing a spiritual connection with a tree in a way that exceeds visual perception; where learning its meaning and value simultaneously improves your own mental and physical wellness. Throughout history, floriographies--flower dictionaries--have gained notoriety for regulating human emotions and giving depth, symbolism, and meaning to extremely delicate aspects of nature. Following the success of The Complete Language of Herbs and its predecessor The Complete Language of Flowers, author S. Theresa Dietz continues this custom with The Complete Language of Trees. Coupled with two indexes, one for searching by common tree name and the other organized by meaning, Dietz cleverly connects quality time in nature with the overall improvement of mental health by developing a stunningly depicted dictionary for gardeners, environmentalists, and nature lovers alike.

The book provides comprehensive information on the importance of conserving endangered animal and plant species. There are many species categorized as very likely to become extinct in their own native ranges in the near future. In fact, thousands of species are lost every year, and their numbers continue to increase annually at an alarming rate. The book is organized into two sections on animal species and plant species. The first section discusses endangered animal species such as Chinese pangolins, Pompa cats Galapagos pinnipeds (sea lions and fur seals), and more. The second section discusses endangered plant species such as dragon blood trees and plants native to Hawaii. The book emphasizes species conservation and proposes various strategies adopted and recommended by experts.

In the late 1630s, lured by the promise of the New World, Andrea Stuart’s earliest known maternal ancestor, George Ashby, set sail from England to settle in Barbados. He fell into the life of a sugar plantation owner by mere chance, but by the time he harvested his first crop, a revolution was fully under way: the farming of sugar cane, and the swiftly increasing demands for sugar worldwide, would not only lift George Ashby from abject poverty and shape the lives of his descendants, but it would also bind together ambitious white entrepreneurs and enslaved black workers in a strangling embrace. Stuart uses her own family story—from the seventeenth century through the present—as the pivot for this epic tale of migration, settlement, survival, slavery and the making of the Americas. As it grew, the sugar trade enriched Europe as never before, financing the Industrial Revolution and fuelling the Enlightenment. And, as well, it became the basis of many economies in South America, played an important part in the evolution of the United States as a world power and transformed the Caribbean into an archipelago of riches. But this sweet and hugely profitable trade—“white gold,” as it was known—had profoundly less palatable consequences in its precipitation of the enslavement of Africans to work the fields on the islands and, ultimately, throughout the American continents. Interspersing the tectonic shifts of colonial history with her family’s experience, Stuart explores the interconnected themes of settlement, sugar and slavery with extraordinary subtlety and sensitivity. In examining how these forces shaped her own family—its genealogy, intimate relationships, circumstances of birth, varying hues of skin—she illuminates how her family, among millions of others like it, in turn transformed the society in which they lived, and how that interchange continues to this day. Shifting between personal and global history, Stuart gives us a deepened understanding of the connections between continents, between black and white, between men and women, between the free and the enslaved. It is a story brought to life with riveting and unparalleled immediacy, a story of fundamental importance to the making of our world.