Trees are one of humanity's most constant yet most varied companions. From India's sacred banyan tree to the fragrant cedar of Lebanon, they offer us sanctuary and inspiration—not to mention the raw materials for everything from aspirin and silk to space shuttles and telephone lines. In Around the World in 80 Trees, Jonathan Drori journeys through time and across cultures, using up-to-date plant science to demonstrate how trees play a role in every part of human life. Ranging from the romantic to the regrettable, some of the stories illustrate the surprising historical relationships between people and seemingly familiar species, like the elm and the beech. Others showcase the exotic and the extraordinary, such as the exploding sandbox tree and the unique metal-hoarding tree of Polynesia. Each of these strange and true tales—populated by self-mummifying monks, tree-climbing goats, and radioactive nuts—is illustrated by Lucille Clerc, taking the reader on a trip that is as beautiful as it is enlightening.

For readers of Raising Hare and How to Catch a Mole comes a poetic exploration of life at the precarious edge of nature and human settlement.On a small acreage teeming with wild and domestic animals, buzzing with a half-million honeybees, and dotted with fruit trees—including one affectionately named Bill—lives beekeeper-poet Susan Cormier. Circling the farm, an aggressive tangle of forest and blackberry vines thrives, but beyond, the shadow of urban development creeps ever closer. Over five seasons Cormier takes readers through the rhythms of semi-agricultural life, reflecting on the dichotomy between beauty and grief, loss and renewal, and humor and the often heart-wrenching realities of animal existence in an agrarian landscape.Lyrical and poignant, Dead Bees Still Sting is a moving meditation on the cycles of nature, vulnerability, persistence, and survival. Above all, it is a celebration of what it means to belong to a place, to witness its changes, and to find beauty and meaning in the ongoing conversation between humans and nature.

A mind-expanding exploration of how trees learned to shape our world by manipulating the elements, other species, and even humankind, possessing agency beyond anything we might have imaginedFor a supposedly stationary life form, trees have demonstrated an astonishing mastery over the environment around them. They've been using fire since prehistoric times. Some tree species have gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure their fruits reach large primates, who can spread their seeds over vast distances, while poisoning smaller and less useful mammals. Others can split solid rock and create fertile ground in barren landscapes, effectively building entire ecosystems from scratch.In The Genius of Trees, tree scientist Harriet Rix reveals the inventive ways trees sculpt their environment and explains the science of how they achieve these incredible feats. Taking us on an awe-inspiring journey through deep history and across the globe, Rix restores trees to their rightful position not as victims of our negligence, but as ingenious, stunningly inventive agents in a grand ecological narrative. Trees manipulate fundamental elements, other species, and even humankind to achieve their ends, as seen with oaks in Devon, UK, shaping ecosystems through root networks and fungi, those in Amedi, Iraq that can change sex as they get to a certain age, the laurel rainforests of the Canary Islands regulating water cycles, and metasequoias in California influencing microclimates. A recent big surprise has shown that trees have an even greater role in preventing global warming than we trees, which were thought to produce methane, actually consume it. We share one world with trees and one need for survival.This eye-opening journey into the inner lives of nature’s most powerful plant is a profoundly new and original way of understanding both the miracles trees perform and the glories of our natural world.