Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees

Historian Farmer (On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape) offers a winning history of the world’s oldest trees. Ancient trees, he suggests, have sparked reverence and preservation efforts for centuries, and to that end he traces “the scientific search for the world’s oldest living thing.” In the 1700s, French naturalist Michael Adanson was fascinated by the extremely old baobab trees in Africa, and, more recently, the exact coordinates of the oldest living tree, in California, are kept secret to “protect the pine from harm.” (Though the oldest trees, Farmer notes, may in fact be the Cedars of Lebanon, which feature in the Torah and the Epic of Gilgamesh.) The desire to quantify and measure nature can have destructive consequences, Farmer posits, and his melancholy conclusion is informed by the destruction inherent in humans’ relationship with plants: “The oldest living thing ever known to science succumbed to male knowledge seekers. Indeed, it was killed in the act of knowing,” he writes of a tree cut down in 1964. Farmer masterfully blends science, religion, and history, making for a beautiful and moving portrait of nature over time. Fans of Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest should give this a look. (Oct.)