Meetings With Remarkable Trees

A new portable hardback format of Thomas Pakenham's bestselling book of tree portraits.

This astonishing collection of tree portraits in a new kind of tree book owes little to conventional botany. The sixty trees are grouped according to their own strong personalities: Natives, Travellers, Shrines, Fantasies and Survivors. From the ancient native trees, many of which are huge and immeasurably old, to the exotic newcomers from Europe, the East and North America, 'Meetings with Remarkable Trees' captures the history and beauty of these entrancing living structures.

Of the Native trees, the great yew at Selborne, blown down in the 1990 hurricane, but still clinging to life, is believed to be centuries older than the Christian church built beside it in the thirteenth century. When it was young it might have been decorated with human heads cut off as Celtic battle trophies.

The Newcomers make up in size what they lack in age: the current champion is a 100-year-old Douglas fir at The Hermitage, Dunkeld, already 212 feet high. Each tree is a living historical monument in its own right and this volume reveals a variety of sacred trees, poets' trees and fantastical trees extraordinary in both their appearance and history.

Common to all these trees is their power to inspire awe and wonder. This lovingly researched book, beautifully illustrated with colour photographs, engravings and maps, is a moving testimonial to the Earth's largest and oldest living structures.