Nature's temples The complex world of old-growth forests

Due to habitat changes across Earth, a wide variety of information has been written about the loss of biodiversity and the extinction of organisms. In this charmingly written and beautifully illustrated book, Maloof, a forest scientist and writer, uses examples among principal groups of organisms that occupy forests to describe the dependence that a wide range of species have on old-growth forests. Written in a first person, informal style, the author uses personal accounts of her experiences studying and saving old-growth forests, particularly in eastern North America. With a slight hostility toward human actions that have destroyed many of the world's old-growth forests, Maloof provides a somewhat romantic perspective, giving reasons, chapter by chapter, why old-growth forests are essential to birds, amphibians, insects, snails, plants, fungi, and mammals. She also explains how old-growth forests contribute to the production of oxygen, cleaning the air human's breathe, and emphasizes that these forests can renew the human spirit by their beauty alone. This well-written and engaging book is a good introduction to old-growth forests. Although it is a bit elementary, in a separate section at the end of the book the author's ideas and conclusions are scientifically backed by authoritative sources. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Dana L. Richter, Michigan Technological University

years ago, I chanced upon a charming film by the designers Ray and Charles Eames. "Powers of Ten," released in 1977, is a journey in visualizing scale, beginning with a man napping by the edge of the lake in Chicago, then zooming into the vast, mysterious beyond before it snaps back down to the level of an atom. A simple idea, it's obvious - and revelatory. I think about that film when I'm mired in frustrating minutiae. I gardened this summer in a gloomy mood: the breaking of heat records, the breaking of campaign records, and a persistent drought that ruined my tiny patch of the land. The supposedly heat-tolerant salvia didn't like being slathered with blankets of humidity. Swallowtail caterpillars devoured the dill and fennel. But who am I to deny our pollinators, when they're in such trouble? It's time to put tiny demons and devilish details into perspective, to zoom out and gaze in wonder at the original garden - time to celebrate the great outdoors. Luckily, this year the centennial of the National Park Service has been the occasion of exhibits, documentaries, presidential proclamations and many books. The most glorious of these is TREASURED LANDS: A Photographic Odyssey Through America's National Parks (Cameron & Company, $65), by QT Luong. As Dayton Duncan points out in his foreword, photography has always been part of our national parks' story. In the middle of the Civil War, after pictures of Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias were displayed on the East Coast, President Lincoln signed a bill to permanently protect them. By 1916, the very first book of photographs of a dozen parks was published, and its popularity aided the creation of the National Park Service. In the late 1930s, Ansel Adams was hired to tour the parks with his camera. When asked why the government would waste money on this with World War II raging, Adams had a simple answer: His photographs were an "emotional presentation of what we are fighting for." Luong's pictures show us what we are still fighting for today, at least politically. Over the course of more than 20 years, he has visited all 59 parks, in hiking boots and snowshoes, canoes and wet suits. Though this volume is hefty, I wish it had been printed at twice the size. No government agency set Luong's agenda or paid his way. He faced hardship, waiting for those elusive moments of perfect light: sleeping outside overnight in order to catch a sunrise, confronting a brown bear, getting caught in flash floods. All worth it. No one has captured the vast beauty of America's landscape as comprehensively. The book is organized by geographical area - the Colorado Plateau, the Eastern Hardwoods, the Tropics - and features useful maps. In his extensive captions, Luong comes through as a generous, thoughtful guide, as interested in detail as in panorama - so interested that he pauses at one point to describe the unusual aspect of aspen leaves, which contain chlorophyll on both sides, so they always present "a working surface" to the sun as they sway in the wind. For photography buffs, picturing America's national PARKS (George Eastman Museum/Aperture, $50), by Jamie M. Allen, associate curator at the George Eastman Museum, is a delightful smorgasbord. Although the book includes familiar works by Ansel Adams, I was especially taken with the selections from Lee Friedlander's "America by Car" series; Roger Minick's tourists in Wyoming in 1980; Abelardo Morell's weird camera obscura tent image; Len Jenshel's otherworldly hues at Joshua Tree; and Victoria Sambunaris's serene but powerful Texas canyon imagery. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC GREATEST LANDSCAPES: Stunning Photographs That Inspire and Astonish (National Geographic, $40) lives up to its billing by taking us around the world, through four seasons, in the company of masterly photographers. Here you'll find the gnarled trunks of ancient bristlecone pines in California; smears of gold as lavender and wheat dance in the Provençal wind; eerie spikes of rock formations in Kunming, China; and otherworldly parasol mushrooms sprouting under cork oak trees in Spain. All will inspire you to fill your travel bucket-list to overflowing - or be content that someone else has already brought you so much of the world's beauty. That new specimen tulip poplar you're coddling may be lovely, but in NATURE'S TEMPLES: The Complex World of OldGrowth Forests (Timber Press, $27.95), Joan Maloof eloquently urges us to cherish the wildness of what little old-growth woodlands we have left. "Perhaps forests must be managed to get the healthiest economic return," she writes, "but true biological health is found in the unmanaged oldgrowth forests." Not only are they home to the richest diversity of creatures, but they work hard for humans too. Every tree removes an average of 4.3 pounds of air pollutants a year, while it produces oxygen. And old trees sequester more carbon - acting as carbon "sinks" while our trucks and power plants are "sources" of carbon - with ancient redwood forests capable of storing "three times more carbon aboveground than any other forests on earth." And, of course, old trees are beautiful. The forests on our planet are being crowded out, a tragic mistake. Simply saving old forests would be among the most efficient ways to save ourselves. In his foreword to the photographer Matthew Maran's HAMPSTEAD HEATH: London's Countryside (Hemisphere, $45), David Bentley, a representative of the City of London Corporation, makes the case for intense management of the park's grasslands, hedgerows, wetlands and woodlands. That's the only way to keep the Heath from going to wrack and ruin - and to keep it looking "just as it is now," as though nothing had been done. The Heath covers about 800 acres (by comparison, New York's Central Park has 843). In medieval times, some of it was used as a commons for grazing and gathering firewood, but in the late 18th century it had become a popular retreat for Londoners. Maran devotedly tromps its forests and meadows in all seasons. I defy you not to smile when you spot his photo of a Mandarin duck, a species that escaped from captivity to form a feral population in the park's ponds. Elsewhere a battle between a kestrel and a crow is graphically silhouetted, a moment of wildness to contrast with the Mandarin's kempt beauty. As the poets W. B. Yeats and Delmore Schwartz both knew, in dreams begin responsibilities. Perhaps no one dreamed bigger, at least about English beauties, than Lancelot Brown, also known as Capability - as in, your grounds have the capability of improvement. Born 300 years ago, he would happily take responsibility for creating an English style of landscape gardening that has influenced generations of designers; we can see his approach reflected in Manhattan's Central Park and Brooklyn's Prospect Park. He called himself a "place-maker." In an impressive and gorgeous volume, capability brown: Designing the English Landscape (Rizzoli, $65), the renowned garden historian John Phibbs argues that Brown created a great art form that, "at its best, was consciously intended to go unnoticed." It's no surprise, then, that he became known as "the Shakespeare of Gardening." Brown was an earth-mover, shaping the grounds of parks and estates, relocating hills, digging out valleys, damming streams, planting copses, building bridges and sprinkling grottos, rotundas, arches and or naments throughout - all to create a more relaxed, naturalistic-looking landscape. He sought a perfected nature, perhaps framed by wildness, but replete with harmony and grace. His landscapes are like "classically conceived paintings." Among the handsome photographs by Joe Cornish are views of Brown's most famous projects, including Stowe, Chatsworth and Blenheim Palace. While we're hovering over grand landscapes, those in Steven Desmond's gardens of the Italian lakes (Frances Lincoln, $50) are irresistible - even though they're exactly the sort Capability Brown was resisting. We needn't. These gardens are as richly worked as embroidered tapestries, festooned with formal terraces, hedges, pools and all manner of statuary. Feast on Marianne Majerus's photographs of Isola Bella on Lake Maggiore, begun in 1630, with its layer cake of terraces, frothily decorated with obelisks. Or the Villa San Remigio, testament to a long love affair between first cousins, with its marvelous Garden of Sadness, which had no flowers and no view, just a quiet reflecting pool. In LUCIANO GIUBBILEI: The Art of Making Gardens (Merrell, $70), the noted Italian landscape designer presents an ode to Great Dixter, Christopher Lloyd's fabled East Sussex garden. Giubbilei asked Fergus Garrett, who became head gardener in 1993 and has been in charge of Dixter since Lloyd's death in 2006, if he could visit for a while, working in the garden and hothouses, at a time when he felt a profound need for change. What follows, besides a coup de foudre for Dixter, is a loose meditation on the importance of craft, the appeal - and challenge - of simplicity and the beauty of "color that isn't really color." As you wander through Andrew Montgomery's lush photographs of Dixter, as well as those of other projects Giubbilei has designed, you'll find yourself agreeing with his credo: "Gardening . . . is a way to express deep feelings." For those of you - and your numbers are growing - gardening in drought-stricken parts of the country, Johanna Silver's THE BOLD DRY GARDEN: Lessons From the Ruth Bancroft Garden (Timber Press, $34.95) will quench your thirst for inspiration. This dazzling three-and-a-half-acre succulent garden in Walnut Creek, Calif., was the Garden Conservancy's first preservation project. Marion Brenner's elegant photographs ably capture the architectural drama of its bold forms and eccentric groupings, as well as the strange and intriguing textures of individual agaves, cycads, euphorbias and sedums. Plump or spiny, tiny or looming, succulents have enormous variety and endless appeal. It seems almost criminal to avoid them in favor of lawns. Given the water restrictions in many Southwestern cities, we are seeing a new generation of dry designers. Bancroft, who is 107 years old, first planted her garden when she was 63; her children "attribute her longevity to drinking two glasses of milk and one of sherry each day." Care of the gardener matters too. We can't hold Capability Brown entirely responsible for our fixation with lawns, but he certainly rolled out acres of thirsty, finicky green velvet. Even in his day, Capability was controversial. The poet Richard Owen Cambridge said he hoped to die before Brown so he could see heaven before Brown had "improved" it. Gardeners tend to be judgmental sorts. Can't we all just agree that there's plenty of room to accommodate many tastes? To that end, GARDENISTA: The Definitive Guide to Stylish Outdoor Spaces (Artisan, $40), by Michele Slatalla with the editors of the website Gardenista, celebrates our eclectic nature. Slatalla is a garden dervish intent on taking us on a bracing romp through 13 of her favorites. You won't find any pretensions about contemplating the beauty of a crack in the wall: these well-loved spaces are also well lived-in. I especially admired the colorful English cottage beds of the interior designer Ben Pentreath and the restful evergreen Brooklyn backyard of the creative director Mariza Scotch and her husband, Dièry Prudent (a fitness trainer whose outdoor studio is tastefully tucked away at the back), to say nothing of Slatalla's own bountiful nest in Mill Valley, Calif. Slatalla is warm, approachable, lively - and chic. But she lets us in on everyone's secrets with sections labeled "Steal This Look," whether you're hankering for a French florist's bucket or the "ultimate chicken coop." She suggests ideas for paths, fire pits and foot showers; tips for drainage solutions; and a shopping directory that made me reach for my credit card. The Californians Sarah Lonsdale, a co-founder of the website Remodelista, and Louesa Roebuck, an artist and floral designer, share their adventures with foraged FLORA: A Year of Gathering and Arranging Wild Plants and Flowers (Ten Speed Press, $40). The "-ista" ladies (Slatalla and Lonsdale are colleagues) share a hip, confident, cheerful vibe, casual but studied. Amazingly, Lonsdale and Roebuck find all the flower-arranging beauty they need along local trails and roads, even on construction sites. The book opens with a stunning riff on fennel. Play with scale, they urge. Bring in the weeds, use unusual vessels, hang flowers from the rafters or lay them out on a long table or tack them to the edges of shelves. Whatever you do, enjoy their beauty and let your imagination loose. My favorite installation was at a tea business in Lagunitas, Calif., draped with wisteria, roses, apple blossoms and redbud - collected after two days of foraging. For the truly adventurous, there's also a recipe for Candied Rose Petals or Mint Leaves. When it comes to the big picture, not much is in our control. That's why we cherish small moments of beauty, whether found or made. The photographer Ngoc Minh Ngo celebrates people who make beauty their life's work with the gorgeous IN BLOOM: Creating and Living With Flowers (Rizzoli, $45). The textile and wallpaper designer Neisha Crosland covers the walls of her London house with chinoiserie-style flowers. The potter Frances Palmer imprints clay vessels with the vivid dahlias from her Connecticut garden. The horticulturalist Umberto Pasti celebrates Morocco's rich floral history in tile and fabric. The painter Claire Basler rings rooms with floral murals in her French chateau, while in the Bronx, Livia Cetti cuts, dyes, crimps and folds paper into exquisite flower arrangements. Each place is wondrous; for those not lucky enough to have friends around to enhance life with such magic, Ngo's enchanting photographs invite us in. Getting down to earth, let's end with the beginning: an egg. BABY BIRDS: An Artist Looks Into the Nest (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28), by Julie Zickefoose, is as fascinating and unusual as it is endearing. Zickefoose says there's "nothing like being a bird's mama to acquaint you with how it behaves, looks and thinks." For decades, she has been an "avian rehabilitator," complete with federal permits to handle migratory birds; she once rescued four tiny hummingbirds when their nests blew down. It seemed a natural step to begin drawing the transformation nestlings make as they speedily develop after hatching. Her process is painstaking, and breathtaking. A tiny, waxy, yellow-tinged creature rests on a bed of tissue under a warming lamp and is given "a steady supply of newly molted, tender mealworms." Zickefoose almost always draws from life, using only birds from boxes, chimneys or nests whose safety she can guarantee; it's a myth, she tells us, that eggs or baby birds touched by humans will be abandoned. What follows is a riveting diary of daily bird (and human) growth. Zickefoose tends 26 Eastern bluebird boxes at her house in Connecticut, and in a good year they will fledge close to a hundred young birds. Thankfully, given the perilous state of some of our songbirds, she isn't interested in "letting nature take its course." She rescues freezing birds, pulls obstacles from their throats, even makes new nests if old ones are overrun with parasites. I lost myself for hours in her adventures. Two hummingbirds she is painting are killed by jays on their 13th day. It seems miraculous that any of these wobbly-necked beings are ever able to soar, to become flickers of color across our meadows. You could say the same of baby humans. Nature can be messy and heartbreaking. That anyone can devote her life to studying it with such meticulous attentiveness should fill us with joy and hope. ? Dominique browning works for the Environmental Defense Fund as the senior director of Moms Clean Air Force.

Preface Forests have sprung naturally from the earth with no help required from humans. Although trees are the most obvious part of a forest, many, many other life forms exist there as well. The measure of this variety of life forms is termed biodiversity. The past ten thousand years have seen a drastic reduction in biodiversity due to human activities, primarily the way we manipulate the land. Many species have disappeared completely. Harvesting wood products from forests is one way that humans affect the land. In this book we look specifically at how the life forms in an ancient undisturbed forest, including the trees, differ from the life forms in a forest manipulated by humans. The details are shared in these pages, but I will give you the conclusion up front: more species exist in old-growth forests than in the forests we manage for wood products, and some species exist only in older forests. In the chapters ahead you will frequently see old-growth forests compared to managed forests, so perhaps it is useful to clarify these terms right away. The forests that have formed naturally over a long period of time with little or no disturbance we call old-growth forests. In contrast, managed forests are the result of purposeful human action. Management techniques include logging, thinning, burning, planting, and spraying. Forests can be managed in many different ways and for many different reasons, but most often they are managed to grow timber for particular wood products that result in a financial return. Although wood is a wonderful renewable resource, and most owners of forestland are now careful to replant after harvesting, it is a misconception that typical forest management can conserve all forest biodiversity. Scientific evidence tells us otherwise. In these pages I present the evidence. The studies that enable us to challenge the misconception are sprinkled far and wide among many different journals and over many years, so I thought it helpful to compile descriptions of the studies and their results in a book. I originally intended to include only the studies done in eastern North American forests (since the western forests have been the focus of other books), and although the focus here remains on eastern forests, I soon realized that including a global perspective added depth to the evidence. Over and over I have read or heard espoused that forests must be managed to be healthy. Perhaps forests must be managed to get the healthiest economic return, but true biological health is found in the unmanaged old-growth forests. I can say that because the scientists who have done these careful studies have offered their data to us. I also know it to be true because I have spent time in many, many old-growth forests and have heard the birdsong, witnessed the soaring canopies, and breathed the forest air. "When we try to pick out anything by itself," John Muir wrote in My First Summer in the Sierra, "we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." The truth of this often-quoted line will be evidenced over and over again in these pages. Although each chapter has a specific topic, you will soon see that they are all, indeed, hitched together. Excerpted from Nature's Temples: The Complex World of Old-Growth Forests by Joan Maloof All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.