Forestry Books

As the most dominant and permanent feature in any garden, trees establish a landscape's character more than any other plant. A well-chosen tree in the right location adds color, form, and dimension.

Moreover, trees can filter the air of pollutants, muffle noise, screen the sun, calm the wind, attract birds, reduce soil erosion, raise the water table, and increase property values. Knowing which varieties to grow and how to maintain them is a must for anyone who owns trees or is considering planting one.

The Tree Doctor is a comprehensive manual for tree selection, care, and maintenance. The authors cover the options to consider before buying and what to look for when making your selection.

Other topics include: tree placement; choosing a healthy tree from a nursery; proven urban varieties; detailed planting, pruning, and watering instructions; protecting trees from pests, disease, and weather; diagnosing problems; identifying hazardous trees; and how to hire qualified experts when needed.

The Tree Doctor is an easy-to-understand guide for growing healthy trees that will benefit generations to come.

The Squirrel Wife A kind young man is rewarded with a bride who is kin to the wild in this beautiful, original fairy tale.

The green people in the woods are feared by all — all except swineherd Jack, who dares to venture into the forest to answer a cry for help. Jack’s heroism unveils the true nature of the green people and earns him an idyllic life with a woman he loves. But can they survive the ignorance around them? Magical storytelling and luminous woodland scenes easily transport readers to another time and place.

Common Sense Forestry (Books for Wiser Living from Mother Earth News) Trees are the ultimate sunlight-harvesting machines. The care and nurturing of trees has been a recurring theme in Chelsea Green's publishing program, from The Man Who Planted Trees to Julia Alvarez's A Cafecito Story. Here is a book that foregoes romance in favor of straightforward, practical knowledge. Twenty-five years ago, when Hans Morsbach became interested in cultivating trees and managing small woodlands, he searched for a good how-to manual. He never found one, so he decided to write his own someday. Based on his subsequent experience, combining deep research into the academic literature on forestry with his successes and failures as a small-scale commercial tree farmer, the result is Common Sense Forestry, an indispensable reference for anyone who owns or wants to own wooded property. Morsbach is an unabashed nature lover as well as a businessman, and well understands the essential importance of a long-term approach to sustainable forest management. In this highly readable and entertaining text, the author offers a comprehensive look at managing existing woodlands by creating, and later maintaining, forests that promote biodiversity while providing an income stream. This comprehensive examination of sustainable forestry includes everything from choosing land to beginning a forest through seeding and transplanting, from pruning and thinning to harvesting trees, from debates over herbicides and clearcutting to working with professional foresters, from business strategies to tax planning. While Morsbach's personal experience is in the Midwest, the information in this book is applicable to a wide range of trees and is relevant to all regions of North America.

Covers different methods of cutting and drying timber.

The Urban Tree Book: An Uncommon Field Guide for City and Town North America's cities may be crowded and tumultuous places of steel and glass, but there is scarcely one of them that does not have some quiet forested corner, some green place of solace and repose. Arthur Plotnik, the author of the fine writer's handbook The Elements of Editing, celebrates such places in The Urban Tree Book, an information-rich, entertaining guide to the trees you are likely to encounter in places such as Toronto, Washington, Vancouver, and Kansas City. (For residents of cities farther south and west, he includes a section on palm trees.) A late bloomer--he writes that he came to an appreciation of city greenery not as a naturalist, but as a writer given to staring out his window at a cluster of silver maple, ash, and horse chestnut trees--Plotnik has mastered a wide variety of materials. He describes not only the ranges, biology, and life histories of some 50 common urban trees, but also gathers oddments of folklore and nicely appropriate bits of urban history, such as, for instance, the fact that Al Capone favored an ash bat "to keep his goons in line."

As Plotnik observes, at the dawn of the 21st century, 75 percent of all North Americans live in cities. In his pages these urbanites will find a wealth of information to help better acquaint themselves with the natural life that perseveres in their midst. --Gregory McNameeOpen The Urban Tree Book and discover the joys of forest trekking--right in your city or town. This first-of-a-kind field guide introduces readers to the trees on their block, in neighborhood parks, and throughout the urban landscape. Unlike traditional tree guides with dizzying numbers of woodland species, The Urban Tree Book explores nature in the city, describing some 200 tree types likely to be found on North America's streets and surrounding spaces, including suburban settings.

With telling descriptions and precise botanical detail, this unique guide not only identifies trees but brings them to life through history, lore, anecdotes, up-to-date facts, and hundreds of fascinating characteristics. More than 175 graceful illustrations capture the charm of trees in urban settings and depict leaf, flower, fruit, and bark features for identification and appreciation.

The Urban Tree Book will inform even the most knowledgeable plant person and delight urbanites who simply enjoy strolling beneath the shade of welcoming trees. An engaging excursion into the "urban forest," this complete guide to city trees will both entertain and enlighten nature lovers, urban hikers, gardeners, and everyone curious about their environment. Includes a tree planting-and-care section, tree primer, and exploration guide
Is backed by the expertise of the renowned Morton Arboretum
Incorporates new "urban forestry" perspectives
Covers urban trees across the continent
Lists key organizations and institutions for tree lovers
Selects the best tree sites on the Internet
Updates many guides by 20 years

The spirit of nineteenth-century naturalistic exploration lives in British historian Thomas Pakenham, who has spent the last decade chronicling the lives of the world's most dramatic trees, many of which are in danger of destruction. After the world-wide success of his previous work, Meetings With Remarkable Trees—a stunning collection of 60 individual trees (and groups of trees) in Britain and Ireland chosen for their unusually strong personalities—Pakenham decided to hunt down and photograph another 60 remarkable trees scattered throughout the globe.

Many of these trees were already famous-champions by girth, height, volume or age-while others had never previously been caught by the camera. Pakenham's five-year odyssey, sweating it out with a 30 pound Linhof camera and tripod, took him to most of the temperate and many of the tropical regions of the world. Although North American trees dominate this book, Pakenham also trekked to remote regions in Mexico, all over Europe, parts of Asia including Japan, northern and southern Africa, Madagascar, Australia and New Zealand.

Despite his expert knowledge, the book owes little to conventional botany. Like its predecessor, Remarkable Trees of the World is arranged according to the characters of the trees themselves. There are Giants and Dwarfs, Methuselahs, Shrines, Dreams, Lovers and Dancers, Ghosts and Trees in Peril. The chief Giant is General Sherman in the Sierra Nevada, California. At over 1400 tons, the grizzled old general, a giant-sequoia, is the world's largest tree, measured by volume - indeed the largest single living thing in the world. The height record, however, goes to another commanding Californian, a 368-foot high Coast redwood recently declared the tallest tree in the world. Among the Methuselahs, Pakenham describes the wind-blasted bristlecone pines of the White Mountains of California. One of them, Old Methuselah himself, was found to be 4,600 years old, making him the oldest tree yet measured by scientists. Shrines include some of the holiest trees in the world, like the immense camphor trees preserved in Shinto shrines in Japan and the 2,200 year old Bo-tree in Sri Lanka, a cutting from the actual tree under which Buddha found enlightenment. Trees in Peril are the trees under attack by predatory loggers and impoverished farmers, including the exotic baobabs of Madagascar, now threatened by intensive farming, and the Great Spruce and Douglas Fir and Redcedars of Pacific North America in whose defense the conservationists have been fighting the loggers for decades.

Remarkable Trees of the World is a magnificent work that celebrates the investigative genius of Thomas Pakenham. It will be treasured for generations by all those who marvel at the wonders of nature.

Fascinating compendium of facts, folklore, superstitions, myths, and anecdotes about trees and the forest. Describes forest customs, temples and sacred groves, mythical forest creatures, famous trees, unusual trees, tree worship, fossil trees, Yule logs, and much more.

Pirone's Tree Maintenance Praised by The New York Times as "an indispensable guide for the homeowner and the professional," Tree Maintenance has been the definitive source on maintenance of North American landscape trees for over fifty years, an essential reference not only for arborists, nurserymen, and landscape architects, but for all homeowners who want to keep their trees healthy and pest free.
The Seventh Edition, now named in honor of Dr. P. P. Pirone, who authored the first five editions and co-authored the sixth, has been revised to reflect the enormous amount of new information available since the last edition, including the latest techniques in selecting, planting, and protecting trees. The authors explain how to evaluate the site (the soil, drainage, and exposure), how to select the right tree for that location, and how to prune, fertilize, and spray for pests. There is an extensive section on the diagnosis and control of tree pests and diseases, and on problems such as construction damage, gas injury, sunscald, leaf scorch, and air pollution. While the general structure of the sixth edition has been retained, there are several topics--notably hazardous trees and coping with tree pests and diseases--that have received greater attention than in previous versions of the book. The second half of the book comprises a systematic listing of the major landscape trees found in North America, describing the specific pests and diseases that attack each species.
Well organized, clearly written, and beautifully illustrated with many new photographs, Pirone's Tree Maintenance is an encyclopedic resource, the first place to turn for information on dogwoods and elms, magnolias and redwoods, or any other tree growing in North America. Anyone serious about gardening will want this book on their shelf.

This Was Logging "Someday" Big Fred Hewett used to say in his Humboldt Saloon in Aberdeen, Washington, "these pictures will show how the boys used to do it." He knew the day would come when the Pacific Northwest's "Big Woods" would be only a fog-blurred memory and the cry "Logs! More Logs!" would no longer be heard ringing up and down the skidroads. With the superb views of timber photographer Darius Kinsey, comprising more than 200 pictures made from wet plate celluloid negatives, 11" x 14", and processed by his pioneer wife, Tabitha, author Andrews dramatically presents a panorama of lumbering's great days in these woods from 1890 to 1925. Shown in sharp detail are the first axes, 12-foot crosscut saws, the first oxen and horses, the first donkey engines and "lokeys". Then the story continues into the "highball" days, the high production period with the steel tower skidders and miles of steel rigging.

Strangely Like War: The Global Assault on Forests (Politics of the Living) "It was strangely like war. They attacked the forest as if it were an enemy to be pushed back from the beachheads, driven into the hills, broken into patches, and wiped out. Many operators thought they were not only making lumber but liberating the land from the trees. . ." from The Last Wilderness, by Murray Morgan, 1976

Derrick Jensen, prize-winning author of A Language Older than Words and The Culture of Make Believe, and George Draffan, activist, researcher, and co-author with Jensen of Railroads & Clearcuts, collaborate again to expose the escalating global war on trees. Ever since Gilgamesh cut down the ancient cedar forests of Mesopotamia, civilizations and empires have foundered and collapsed in the wake of widespread deforestation. Today, with three quarters of the world's original forests gone and the pace of cutting, clearing, processing, and pulping ever accelerating, Jensen and Draffan lay bare the stark scenario we face—we being not only people, but the nonhuman fabric of life itself—unless deforestation is slowed and stopped. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand the relationship between deforestation and our ecological crisis as well as an essential "handbook" for forest and anti-globalization activists.

Recommended Books on Forestry