In Trees: An Exploration, by Robert Moor, published in April and named a “Best Book of the Year So Far” by The New Yorker and NPR, is a wide-ranging meditation on trees that spans the biological, the poetic, the cultural, and the political, with a good hit of adventure thrown in. Moor, author of On Trails, anchors his journey with an attempt to climb a tree near his home that leaves him physically shaken. Fifteen feet in the air, he writes, my “vision wobbled – an aqueous, nauseous sensation – and I felt my heart thrashing in my rib-cage.” He mourns the loss of a childlike playfulness and confidence (babies, he notes, can hang from a branch for minutes at a time), and embarks on an exploration of trees that takes him from England to Japan, from the West Coast to Tanzania, climbing sequoias, spending a night in a chimpanzee nest, and joining an encampment of environmental activists trying to protect a forest from a pipeline development.
Moor has a gift for characterizing the biology of trees in terms that verge on the poetic: through hydrogen bonding, “the tree does not lift water to the sky; the sky lifts water through the tree.” Trees grow downwards and upwards at the same time because they have to “eat sunlight and drink water,” which come from opposite directions. But he is especially interested in the way the process and structure of a tree replicates itself in other arenas. A tree, he notes, “is more like a verb. A tree is what a tree does.” It is not just a living being but “a way of being.” This way of being, or “arborescing,” consists of three continual, overlapping processes: branching, pruning, and gnarling. The immobility of trees requires that they adapt to their environment through a strategy of proliferation. They branch out in all directions, prune over time what proves unnecessary, and gnarl as they reshape themselves around their own history. This process can be found at a microscopic level in the neurology of the human brain. Brains grow through a “lush profusion of neural connections,” far more than needed, and then delete the neural links that go unused. Neuroscientists refer to this process as “blossoming and pruning.” The same branching and pruning pattern is replicated evolutionarily at a macroscopic level in the tree of life.
Likewise, children branch prolifically—they play and explore and question. Adults narrow, and society and the logistics of life force us into channels of the routine. Our behaviors, intellectually, emotionally, and physically, are pruned, and we reshape ourselves around our losses. Moor is determined to resist this narrowing, and this is part of the impetus for launching himself back into trees. He aspires to his own practice of arborescing: a “wise balance between wild branching and careful pruning” in his life. The writing of the book is itself, for him, a deliberate foray into wild branching.
The people in this book are as engaging as the trees. Moor’s travels take him to the Lake District in England, where he is coached in tree climbing as a form of pilgrimage, and to a redwood forest where he is present as a scene is filmed with David Attenborough at the base of an immense sequoia named Andromeda, as tree climbers and videographers set up for a single shot from a camera that descends the entire height of the tree. He takes a deep dive into the art of bonsai, attending the World Bonsai Convention in an arena on the outskirts of Tokyo. There he scores an interview with Masahiko Kimura, widely regarded as the greatest living master of bonsai, who moves around the convention with a black-clad posse of assistants. Kimura “shattered the artform, then re-engineered it,” a Picasso of trees, flipping them upside down, splitting them, and re-sculpting them.
This is a book in which both process and structure are shaped by subject. Moor undertakes the research, travel, and experiences required for this book as a deliberate exercise in his own branching, pruning, and gnarling. Likewise, he organizes the book in tree-like fashion, the Table of Contents renamed a Tree of Contents with a branching rather than linear structure. It runs from “Prologue: Sky” to “Epilogue: Soil,” through chapters that include “Branching” “Pruning,” “Ascending,” “Gnarling,” etc. And while there are times when it feels like extensive digressions into genealogy or primate behavior take us far from the trunk, when the branching could have used more pruning, In Trees remains an immensely diverting ramble through the biology, history, ecology, and culture of trees and our relationship with them, as well as with ourselves and the world we live in.
Jared is an adult services librarian at the Howe Library in Hanover. He purchases a range of nonfiction for the library and conspires with a colleague to devise the library’s programming. When otherwise free, he’s usually in the mountains, swimming in local ponds and rivers, trying his hand at new cuisines, reading, or dreaming of walking the Scottish Highlands.
