The Genius of Trees How Trees Mastered the Elements and Shaped the World

About this book

Taking us on an awe-inspiring journey through deep history and across the globe, The Genius of Trees restores trees to their rightful position not as victims of our negligence but as ingenious, stunningly inventive agents in a grand ecological narrative.

Some have been using fire as a reproductive tool since prehistoric times. Others have gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure their fruits reach large primates, who can spread their seeds over vast distances, while poisoning smaller and less useful mammals. Some can split solid rock and create fertile ground in barren landscapes, effectively building entire ecosystems from scratch. For the first time, we witness the inventive and astonishing ways trees sculpt and even master their environment and understand the science of how they achieve these feats.

From oaks growing in Devon and Amedi in Iraq to the laurel rainforests of the Canary Islands, metasequoias in California and fossil forests preserved from hundreds of millions of years ago, we see how trees not only farm the landscape in which they grow but also manipulate the fundamental elements, other species and even humankind to achieve their ends.

At once transporting and expert, this eye-opening, mind-expanding journey into the inner lives of nature's most powerful plant is a profoundly new and original way of understanding both the miracles trees perform and the glories of our natural world.

Customer Reviews

Biography

Harriet Rix is a tree science consultant based at the Tree Council, where she currently supports Defra in researching tree diseases and urban tree strategies. Before joining the tree sector in 2018, her jobs included farming sheep near Parnassus in Greece, working in landmine clearance in Syria for the HALO Trust and in Eastern Syria for the Danish Church, and as a liaison officer for a US department of state-sponsored EID clearance programme in Baghdad and Anbar province. She acted as a scientific advisor on Adrien Grenier's climate documentary, was secretary for Hedgelink and is a trustee of the Iraqi environmental charity Hasar.

Rix holds a biochemistry degree from the University of Oxford and an MPhil in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge. She was a 2021/2022 London Library Emerging Writer, and her writing and photography has been published in the Financial Times, London Review of Books and Times Literary Supplement, among others. The Genius of Trees is her first book.