Meetings With Remarkable Trees - Softcover

Thomas Pakenham

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841880868 ISBN 13: 9781841880860

Publisher: Cassell, 2001

Synopsis

With this astonishing collection of tree portraits, Thomas Pakenham produced a new kind of tree book. The arrangement owed little to conventional botany. The sixty trees were 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. Meetings with Remarkable Trees was a lovingly researched book, beautifully illustrated with colour photographs, engravings and maps - a moving testimonial to the Earth s largest and oldest living structures.

About this title

Review:

Thomas Pakenham, a distinguished historian of Africa, takes a new tack by writing an old-fashioned kind of book: a catalog of trees of the British Isles. The last such book was published in 1826. In Meetings with Remarkable Trees Pakenham assembles a beautifully photographed gallery of 60-odd trees of Scotland, England, and Ireland, and magnificent trees they are. One is a 600-year-old king oak that looms large over Charleville, Ireland; another is the yew tree that Wordsworth called the "pride of Lorton's vale"; still another is a sequoia brought from the United States and planted in a Herefordshire grove in 1851, where it has since flourished. Pakenham helpfully includes a map showing the locations of his scattered dramatis personae; you could make a fine tour retracing his steps and having a look for yourself.

About the Author:

Thomas Pakenham is the author of the critically acclaimed The Scramble for Africa which won the W.H. Smith Award and the Alan Paton Award. He is also the author of The Boer War, The Mountains of Rasselas and The Year of Liberty. He lives in County Westmeath, Ireland and is chairman of the Irish Tree Society. He plants trees both for profit and ornament.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cassell
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1841880868
• ISBN 13: 9781841880860
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256