Book description
'Everyone interested in the natural world will enjoy The Secret Life
of Trees. I found myself reading out whole chunks to friends' The
Times, Books of the Year
What is a tree? As this celebration of the trees shows, they are our
countryside; our ancestors descended from them; they gave us air to
breathe. Yet while the stories of trees are as plentiful as leaves in
a forest, they are rarely told.
Here, Colin Tudge travels from his own back garden round the world
to explore the beauty, variety and ingenuity of trees everywhere: from
how they live so long to how they talk to each other and why they came
to exist in the first place. Lyrical and evocative, this book will
make everyone fall in love with the trees around them.
Colin Tudge started his first tree nursery in his garden aged 11,
marking his life-long interest in trees. Always interested in plants
and animals, he studied zoology at Cambridge and then began writing
about science, first as features editor at the New Scientist and then
as a documentary maker for the BBC. Now a full-time writer, he appears
regularly as a public speaker, particularly for the British Council
and is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London and visiting Research
Fellow at the Centre of Philosophy at the London School of Economics.
His books include The Variety of Life and So Shall We Reap.
The Secret Life of Trees brings together Colin Tudge's knowledge of
trees and his fascination with them, built up from trips to the
rainforest in Costa Rica, Panama and Brazil, to his time India, New
Zealand, China, the United States ... and his own back garden. He is
unable to choose a favourite tree, believing that variety's the thing.
