The hidden company that trees keep Life from treetops to root tips

Picking up a monument-sized book that starts with an avuncular explanation that the term photosynthesis means "to put together with light" may not inspire confidence that the book will be a worthwhile investment of an established scientist's time. However, this reader was soon persuaded by the author's sturdy wordsmithing, the supporting 427 patiently explicative pen-and-ink illustrations, and the text's astonishing natural history detailing what may be found on the branches, leaves, roots, and trunks of trees. For example, who knew that the hairy junctures between the veins on sycamore leaves appear to house beneficial symbionts and an entire zoo full of predators and prey? How would a student stumble on this information without an author such as Nardi (Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)? The value of books such as this one--that ask seemingly silly questions such as "who lives on trees?"--is that the typical barriers between various academic disciplines quickly break down, overriding more experienced readers' potential objections. The wandering-through-the-woods aspect of the book is made tractable by the generous 448-entry index and scientifically rigorous by the 166 citations to the literature providing multiple avenues for further study. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. --George C. Stevens, formerly, University of New Mexico

"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.)