We all love trees. Our streets, parks, playgrounds and backyards are lined with trees that create a peaceful, aesthetically pleasing environment.One of the pleasures of summer is to curl up in a hammock in the shade of a leafy tree with a good book. They provide shade, magnificent color in the fall and blossoms in spring. Trees provide oxygen and improve air quality, add value to your home, provide habitats for our avian neighbors and food for wildlife, besides innumerable other benefits. In mythologies and legends, trees are considered representative of life, growth, wisdom, power and prosperity. Trees are being decimated at an alarming rate in our world’s forests and this affects ecosystems, wildlife, weather patterns and climate negatively.
Here are listed some tree themed books and a program that remind us of the importance and value of these majestic elements of nature.
Virtual Program: Demystifying Trees: Identify the trees in your yard
We are all enjoying the cool shade and rich foliage of the trees in our yards and neighborhoods in these warm summer months, but how much do we really know about the trees surrounding us? NJ Audubon can help you demystify the trees growing around your home with this engaging introduction to tree identification, presented live via Zoom, on Thursday August 6th starting at 11 am. You will be shown the basics of tree classification, the first step to identifying a tree, and some common native trees.
Register for the program here https://bccls.libcal.com/event/6846928 and you will receive a zoom link the day before.
Books and Ebooks
The Easy Tree Guide: Common Native and Cultivated Trees of the United States and Canada by Keith Rushforth
Forest Bathing: How Trees Can Help You Find Health and Happiness by Dr. Qing Li Audiobook
The definitive guide to the therapeutic Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku, or the art and science of how trees can promote health and happiness. Dr. Li, the world’s foremost expert in forest medicine, shows how forest bathing can reduce your stress levels and blood pressure, strengthen your immune and cardiovascular systems, boost your energy, mood, creativity, and concentration, and even help you lose weight and live longer.
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate -Discoveries From a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben
Forester Wohlleben convincingly makes the case that the forest is a social network. He draws on groundbreaking scientific discoveries to describe how trees are like human families: tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow, share nutrients with those who are sick or struggling, and even warn each other of impending dangers.
Mesquite: An Arboreal Love Affair by Gary Paul Nabhan & Petey Mesquitey
An homage to the useful and idiosyncratic mesquite tree. In desert regions that cover more than a third of our continent, mesquite trees have become the staff of life, not just for indigenous cultures, but for myriad creatures, many of which respond to these “nurse plants” in wildly intelligent and symbiotic ways. Drawing on his half-century of immersion in desert ethnobotany, ecology, linguistics, agroforestry, and eco-gastronomy, Nabhan opens up for us a hidden world that we had never glimpsed before. Along the way, he explores the sensuous reality surrounding this most useful and generous tree.
The Overstory: A Novel by Richard Powers
An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers-each summoned in different ways by trees-are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest. Powers delivers a sweeping, impassioned novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of-and paean to-the natural world.
The Secret Wisdom of Nature: Trees, Animals, and the Extraordinary Balance of All Living Things; Stories from Science and Observation (Mysteries of Nature Trilogy) by Peter Wohlleben & Jane Billinghurst– Audiobook
Master storyteller and international sensation Wohlleben takes listeners on a thought-provoking exploration of the vast natural systems that make life on Earth possible. In this tour of an almost unfathomable world, Wohlleben describes the fascinating interplay between animals and plants and answers such questions as, How do they influence each other? Do lifeforms communicate across species boundaries? and What happens when this finely tuned system gets out of sync?
Seeing Trees: Discover the Extraordinary Secrets of Everyday Treesby Nancy Ross Hugo & Robert Llewellyn
Focusing on widely grown trees, this captivating book describes the rewards of careful and regular tree viewing, outlines strategies for improving your observations, and describes some of the most visually interesting tree structures, including leaves, flowers, buds, leaf scars, twigs, and bark.
Sprout lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees by William B. Logan
Arborist William Bryant Logan recovers the lost tradition that sustained human life and culture for ten millennia. He offers us both practical knowledge about how to live with trees to mutual benefit and hope that humans may again learn what the persistence and generosity of trees can teach.
Trees (Movie)
Exploring the world of trees this video defines what makes up a tree including the different parts of the tree. It also explains the difference between deciduous trees and coniferous trees and why trees are important parts of our lives.
Trees in Trouble: Wildfires, Infestations, and Climate Change by Daniel Mathews
A story of the devastating and compounding effects of climate change in the Western and Rocky Mountain states, told through in-depth reportage and conversations with ecologists, professional forest managers, park service scientists, burn boss, activists, and more.
Hoopla has several ebooks on trees in its collection.
-Archana, Adult Services & Acquisitions Librarian