Ancient Trees: Trees That Live For 1,000 Years

Rating:
Summary: They lend to our lives a sense of timelessness
Review: "If you've seen one redwood tree, you've seen them all." --Ronald Reagan

In "answer" to this stupidity by our ex-president, the authors of this attractive coffee table style book quote John Muir on page 7:

"Among all the varied productions with which Nature has adorned the surface of the earth, none awakens our sympathies, or interests our imagination so powerfully as those venerable trees which seem to have stood the lapse of ages, silent witnesses of the successive generations of man, to whose destiny they bear so touching a resemblance, alike in their budding, their prime, and their decay."

A tree that lives for a thousand years inspires awe and reverence. These are wonders of the world both modern and ancient. They need to be saved, and they need to be seen. I wish I could see them all. This book is as close as I'll ever get. I have, though, stood in the redwood forest of California and felt the sense of awe that so inspired Muir, a sense of being inside the sacred cathedral of nature. My senses were hushed and my spirit elevated. I wonder what Reagan thought when he stood there (as he undoubtedly did). Perhaps he wondered how many cubic feet of timber the tallest tree in the world might yield.

There are eighteen chapters, each devoted to different types of tree with specimens over a thousand years old, from the majestic redwood to the strange welwitschia, the "dwarf tree of the Namib desert," which reaches a height of only about five feet, and produces but a single pair of leaves in its lifetime, which can extend to two thousand years. Other chapters are devoted to fig trees, mighty oaks, sweet chestnuts, limes, olives, yews, cedar, gingko, the Montezuma Cypress, and of course the Bristlecone Pine, the oldest tree of all with one specimen, the Methuselah tree, said to be over 4,700 years old.

The colorful photographs from around the world by Edward Parker are beautiful, lavish and give us a sense of the enduring presence of the trees in their settings. There is a map of the world with numbered bullets to show locations.

The text, which tends to the cloying at times, alas, could use some work. Such boilerplate sentences as "Yet today, despite all the research that has taken place, the Amazon continues to be an awesome and mysterious place that holds many secrets" (p. 60) are all too frequent. Would that the text were more devoted to the simple sharing of factual information about the flowering of the trees, pollination, pollinators, seed dispersal, and perhaps about related species. The attempt to wed the trees to the ancient myths of indigenous peoples or to fix the "religious significance" of the trees has its place, but is takes up too much of the text here. I would prefer more information on the ecology of the trees. In the chapter on the majestic European limes, nowhere is it mentioned that these are not citrus trees! (Or am I the only one to think that a lime tree might be a citrus tree?)

The sometimes careless editing also detracts from the beauty of this book. While it may be forgiven that "gingko" is spelled two different ways ("gingko" and "ginkgo") on the same page (e.g., on pages, 19, 182, 183), it is not acceptable to have a photo of Brazilian nuts mistakenly identified as pods (p. 63). Additionally, on pages 30-31 a sentence is broken off and then there are three lines of repeated text.

In spite of these flaws this is a beautiful book that makes us feel in touch with nature and gives us a sense of the strength and endurance of living things.

Rating:
Summary: Even a coffee table book should have substance
Review: A book that justifies itself by focusing on the "ancientness" of its subjects must do two things if it is to be taken seriously as a contribution to knowledge. First, it must discuss the issue of longevity in trees in some depth, and tie that in with what is known or suspected about longevity in other organisms. If indeed this is a catalog of the ancient, then what can we make of it? What general truths emerge from the data? The author makes no serious attempt to synthesize the information she brings to light -- just some offhand comments in her introduction. This gives the reader little understanding of the biology of aging, or the causes of longevity. So we find here nothing to increase our understanding of those phenomena,just anecdotes about the trees chosen as examples. This is a missed opportunity. Second, the author owes her readers some certainty that the book's major facts are indeed facts. I do not quibble here about numerous small errors of botany or geography that should have been caught by a publisher's fact checker; but rather the facts that form the core of this book's purpose -- tree ages. Many of the trees that are featured here come from tropical or subtropical areas, where annual ring evidence is not available for aging trees. Thus no precise age can be determined. She mentions a few cases where radiocarbon dating has been done, but gives no citations to it in the bibliography, which contains few references of scientific value. Based on carbon dating of a 1,000 year-old tree, she blithely assumes that baobabs up to 4,000 years old are somewhere out there. Her most outrageous age data are "at least 5,000 years old, possibly 9,000 years old" for a yew in Scotland. This latter figure is almost double the precisely determined age of the oldest known bristlecone pine. If there is credible evidence the yew could be so ancient, any responsible author would cite it. She does not. This then is not a book whose "facts" can be trusted, or one that advances knowledge of its main subject.

Rating:
Summary: Worthy Of All Coffee Tables
Review: An outstanding book worth adding to any collection. Travel around the world to visit the great Trees that live with us on our planet. Rare Welwitschia the oldest tree on earth and the African Baobab are featured. This book is filled with hundreds of color photos. Anna lewington and Edward Parker are to be commended for their work.

Rating:
Summary: A likable coffee-table book
Review: I liked this. I bought this for the pictures of Welwitschia cones, something I did not encounter a good picture of before. Admittedly these are an exception in the degree of detail they show: all the other pictures are 'atmosphere' pictures only. This is really a coffee-table book only, not a tree book.

For a coffee table book it has relatively few errors. Sure, on page 63 the lay-out editor inserted the "(right)" at the wrong place in the caption (should have been after "nuts" instead of "pods") and an occasional misspelling of "ginkgo" slipped through. Worse the taxonomic position of Welwitschia is misdescribed (off the scale). The chapter on yew is indeed riddled with errors. A knowledgable editor with a red pencil could have a whale of a time. But for a coffee-table book it is well above average and it has got its facts mostly straight (and up to date). It is a coffee-table book, not science.

The most remarkable thing wrong with it is that it omitted the best documented oldest genuine tree species, even though it is extremely big. This must be because it occurs about as far away from England as can be. The book has a distinct bias: the world's oldest tree species occur in England with the British Empire's former Colonies bringing up the rear. The rest of the world is devoid of old trees! (Allright, one species that is often planted on English lawns is thrown in to represent the rest of the world). A coffee-table book for sure, meant for the English coffee-table.

Rating:
Summary: could be a lot better
Review: I was hoping for two things in this book. I was hoping to get an insight into what it is that makes it possible for organisms to live so long. All we have here are anecdotes about specific species, no discussion in general about extraordinary longevity in the plant kingdom. Second, I was hoping to get a sense of scale and magnificence looking at the photographs. Personally, I found the photography mediocre. I don't care how grissled and torn up an ancient tree is, a good photographer will find a way of capturing its terrible beauty. There is little of that here. All too often the photos of these ancient beings look like nothing more than a mess. Also, some of the descriptions of the photos sound preposterous. A good example is the picture of the supposedly 6,000 year old lime tree on page 103. The text claims that the copice stool was measured to be 52 feet across. The only sense of scale suggested in the photo is the grass at the base of the stool. If that stool is 62 feet across, that makes the blades of grass 10 to 20 feet long. I just have to shake my head. If the text is building up the collosal size of some of these trees, then the photographer should try to indicate this size with perhaps someone standing next to the tree. I don't think there is a single photo in here with someone standing next to the tree. You want to know about photographing trees? See "Remarkable Trees of the World" by Thomas Pakenham. Now THAT guy knows how to present a collosal image! And his photos are also aesthetic masterpieces.

Is there anything I liked about this book? One thing I took away from this book is an appreciation of how many tree species there are in the world that live to an ancient age. I remember growing up thinking there were only three species that lived a long time: the California redwoods and the Bristlecone Pine. Then I moved to the Pacific Northwest and my knowledge expanded a little more as I discovered that cedars and yews and a few others could live a couple thousand years or so. Pakenham's two tree books then expanded my understanding even more, and now "Ancient Trees" has awakened me to the fact that tree species capable of living thousands of years are not all that uncommon -- maybe uncommon considering the number of tree species extant, but not uncommon geographically. They are everywhere, on all continents. This is a revelation to me. But as another reviewer pointed out, some of the claims in this book sound more like superstitions than scientific facts. 9,000 years for a single tree? I don't care if it IS a yew. Give me some proof, not the testimony of local legends.

Rating:
Summary: Meet Some Big Trees
Review: Stunning photos of enormous trees from around the world. Authors made efforts to represent multiple parts of the globe. As noted in other reviews, the focus is on famous examples of various tree species known for their longevity. The text makes for interesting reading, too, noting historical attitudes towards various tree species. Of course the book doesn't contain the dry scientific rigor that would be necessary to adequately address complex issues surrounding how trees survive for so long. This book seems to be intended more as a celebration of amazing trees (read the introduction). However, there is some content addressing how some trees get real old, pointing out how human intervention has actually prolonged the lives of some specimens.

My only complaint is that the western red cedar gets a mere two-sentence, small-font honorable mention in the rear of the book.

Rating:
Summary: A beautiful and informative book
Review: This absorbing book explores some of the oldest living organisms on the planet. Over eighteen types of trees are investigated, from the skyscraping Redwood of North America to the groundhugging Welwitschia of Namibia. Here is the complete list: Redwood, Brittlecone Pine, Montezuma Cypress, Monkey Puzzle, Amazonian Ancients (including Brazil Nut, Cumaru and Castanha de Macaco), Yew, Oak, Sweet Chestnut, Lime, Olive, Welwitschia, Baobab, Kauri, Totara, Antarctic Beech, Fig, Cedar and Ginkgo. At the beginning of each discussion there is an info panel providing the botanical name, distribution, the oldest known living specimen, historical significance and conservation status of each. The text is quite engaging and the introduction even covers the literary and artistic inspiration of trees in the works of Wordsworth, Vincent van Gogh, Thomas Jefferson, Aldous Huxley, William Blake and others. There is a double page full color map, about 150 beautiful color photographs plus black and white illustrations. The photographs are magnificent. This engrossing and visually impressive work concludes with an extensive bibliography and an index.

Rating:
Summary: Facinating and beautiful
Review: This book is a enthralling look at the world's oldest trees. Aside from the famed redwoods and bristlecone pines, how many know that limes can live over 1000 years, or that olive trees from Plato's time still yield their fruit in season? reading the chapters of this book send the mind wandering back across all of human history: the Tree of One Hundred Horses, an olive tree so huge that its' shade could cover literally a hundred head of horse, famous in Plato's time, has thrived at the foot of Mt. Etna, an active volcano, since nearly the dawn of history. Or, think of how there are cedars in Lebanon that were standing when Solomom's temple was built out of their brothers. The reverie and sense of awe that this tome's stories inspire are well worth the price. -Lloyd A. Conway