If you want to give an heirloom present, this is the book to give this Christmas. Because of the fascination and importance of its subject matter, its astonishingly good photographs and its rich allusive text, it will be read and dipped into for decades to come. The writer and photographer is Thomas Pakenham, a Co Westmeath man and founder chairman of the flourishing Irish Tree Society.
This is not a book about normal trees. It is a book about remarkable trees - trees remarkable for their age, size, religious or historical associations. The oldest tree in the book has lived for over 2,500 years. The tallest tree, in fact the tallest living thing, a coast redwood in California, is taller than a 30-storey skyscraper. Another tree at Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka is associated with Buddha, founder of one of the world's great religions.
This book, however, is not a recital of statistics. It is a record of personal encounters with trees. The author writes of these encounters as "meetings" in the same way that he might write about meetings with human personalities. (His previous book was called Meetings with Remarkable Trees after the book Meetings with Remarkable Men by the Graeco-Armenian philosopher and mystic, Gurdjieff).
Pakenham is not the first to imbue trees with quasi-human personalities. A cluster of giant sequoia trees in California have been likened to grand old men, and so have been known for a long time as "The Senate". Another group is called "The House" after the US House of Representatives, and yet another group, consisting of a tall robust single tree growing next to a threesome of smaller but more elegant trees, is known as "The Bachelor and the Three Graces".
Pakenham's anthropomorphic approach immediately engages audience attention, generating in the reader a sense of personal intimacy with each tree and a new, or renewed, interest, regard and respect for trees and the world of vegetation in general. This makes the book not only an entertaining and instructive one but also a polemical one. It is a plea for, and an important contribution to, the current global preoccupation with the conservation of nature.
Pakenham's photography awakens our human sensitivities to the precious natural treasures represented by these trees. It is difficult to photograph big trees. Their heads are often hidden in low cloud. Their limbs are often obscured by the close-encircling foliage of nearby vegetation. The natural light by which we view them is subject to many daily and seasonal vagaries. Pakenham's poetic photographs capitalise on these apparent disadvantages to stun us with their unusual angles and perspectives.
It is not usual nowadays to moralise on the smallness of man. But great trees do induce a sense of it. Beneath a great tree like that known as "General Sherman" in the Sequoia National Park in California, human beings suffer incredible diminution. The struggles of man pale into insignificance when compared with the battle for survival of 100-year-old junipers on limestone 6,000 feet up in the Taurus mountains of Turkey, or of ancient baobab trees in the oven-like heat of a Botswana desert, or of half-living, half-dead bristle cone pines in the White Mountains of southern California. They are symbols of endurance. It is remarkable how life can continue even in the most inhospitable of environments. The photographs of these trees generate in the reader an optimism about the future of life on this planet, which is currently subject to an unprecedented assault at the hand of man.
The book's text often addresses the audience directly, so that the reader feels she or he is in conversation with the author. There are many other devices by which the author makes the text easily accessible. Each chapter begins with one of those narrative chapter headings, such as "In which Peter gets his come-uppance", which were a convention of the 19th-century novel. Pakenham's chapters tend to have names such as "The Cedars They Turned into Totems" and "Any Fool Can Climb a Gum Tree".
Many of his encounters with trees are related as if they were more like adventures. They have a dare-devil, derring-do quality that makes the book an ideal one not only for adults but also for children. A similar effect is achieved by the introduction in the text of those semi-mythical inhabitants of woodlands well-known to children, such as dwarfs, giants, elves trolls, even "ents", those half-human trees from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
Thomas Pakenham set himself a titan task, in which he visited no fewer than 18 far-flung countries to research and photograph these trees, which were often located in remote and difficult terrain. At a time when man's apparently insatiable desire for timber and timber products has led to the destruction of so many trees and forests worldwide, the greatest service this book will do will be to increase our sensitivities to these venerable arboreal giants and to vegetable world in general.
Patrick Bowe is the author or co-author of seven books, including three on Irish gardens, The Gardens of Portugal, Gardens in Central Europe and Gardens of the Caribbean
Remarkable Trees of the World. By Thomas Pakenham. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 192 pp, £ 25 sterling