The Hidden Company That Trees Keep: Life from Treetops to Root Tips

“You can tell a lot about a tree by the company it keeps,” contends Nardi (Discoveries in the Garden), a research scientist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in this scattered volume. Nardi explores how animals and insects interact with and shape the health of trees, describing how beetles pollinate flowers, birds disperse seeds, and parasitic larvae protect trees by debilitating other insects that feast on leaves. Trees are more complex than one might think, he suggests, noting that they have an “elaborate immune system” that emits chemicals to attract wasps and other predatory insects who hunt bugs that eat leaves and wood. Unfortunately, the author spends disappointingly little time examining these kinds of cross-species interactions, instead training the bulk of his attention on profiling dozens of insect species that depend on trees, which will be a slog for anyone who’s not an entomologist. Tidbits about, for instance, “leaf mining” caterpillars that eat only the insides of leaves and daddy longlegs that use noxious chemicals to repel predators intermittently intrigue, but they’re stranded in a sea of insect descriptions that resembles a field guide, despite not being useful as such because of its unintuitive organizational scheme. This doesn’t quite come together. (Feb.)