Review by Booklist Review
Farmer, a University of Pennsylvania professor of history and a prize-winning author (for On Zion's Mount, 2009), centers here on the world's oldest trees--elderflora--and their complicated relationship to Homo sapiens. "People cherish big trees, old trees, and especially big old trees. Except for when they don't." Farmer examines this paradox of human veneration, neglect, ignorance, care, monetization, thoughtful sequestering, and sheer cheapening in recounting the origins of the cedar, olive, gingko, peepul (sacred fig, or bodhi), baobob, yew, kauri, cypress, redwood, sequoia, and the venerable Great Basin bristlecone pine--and specifically how humans have misperceived their multifold value through the centuries. One of the more sordid examples: Donal Rusk Currey, who in 1964 cut down the world's oldest known tree, a 4,900-year-old bristlecone pine in California's White Mountains, in order to determine its age. This is no breezy read, but Farmer shares an unusual breadth and depth of botanical and human history, offering long, sometimes twisty profiles of significant scientists, among them Edmund Schulman, who pioneered the field of dendrochronology, the study of growth rings. The author ends this tragic tale with a benediction, if not hope: "May there ever be timeful beings on Earth, with and without our knowing."
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An ingenious examination of old trees, mixing history, politics, and science. Trees are simply big plants, but humans have long revered them, and bigger, older trees have been objects of worship. Farmer, a history professor and author of Trees in Paradise and On Zion's Mount, adds that we often revere old trees better than old people. "Caring for elderflora does not track with eldercare," he writes. "Because gnarled trees possess personhood without bodily mortality, and because they have oldness without elderliness, they elicit wonder and esteem, unlike hunched bodies of old people, objects of pity and contempt." The author defines an "old" tree as one that has lived more than 1,000 years. Almost all are evergreen gymnosperms ("flowerless plants with naked seeds") as opposed to angiosperms ("flowering plants with fruits"). Farmer's examples--cedar, olive, ginkgo, fig, baobab--have enormous capacity to recover from catastrophic damage. "At the organismal level," writes the author, "they do not senesce, meaning they don't lose vitality with age. In theory, such a plant is internally capable of immortality." Death comes via an external force: wind, flood, disease, and, increasingly, humans. By the 18th-century, most Western cultures no longer worshiped trees but grew fascinated by those of great age and historical symbolism. Farmer devotes much of the narrative to the scientists who study them and the ongoing efforts of naturalists and Indigenous people to reconcile industrial capitalism with forest preservation. Nature lovers will relish the author's stories, if not his conclusion. Tree cover is expanding across the planet but mostly through monoculture plantations of young, commercially useful trees. Humans continue to cut down old-growth forests. Farmer notes that we wonder what it was like for our ancestors to live among mastodons and other giant animals. Our descendants may wonder how it felt to experience "mammoth and millennial trees." Fascinating accounts of the greatest plants that ever lived. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
