Notes on Colin Tudge's The Tree

Notes on Colin Tudge's The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter
By Joan Zimmerman

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The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter
by Colin Tudge.

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From the Preface:

"In short, without trees our species would not have come into being at all. And if trees had disappeared after we hit the ground, we would still be scrabbling like baboons (assuming the baboons had even allowed us to live)."

Sections:

I WHAT IS A TREE?

Trees in mind: Simple questions with complicated answers
Keeping track
How trees became
Wood

II ALL THE TREES IN THE WORLD.

Trees without flowers: the conifers
Trees with flowers: Magnolias and other primitives
From palms and screw pines to yuccas and bamboos: the monocot trees
Thoroughly modern broadleaves
From oaks to mangoes: the glorious inventory of rose-like eudicots
From handkerchief trees to teak: the daisy-like eudicots

III THE LIFE OF TREES.

How trees live
Which trees live where, and why
The social life of trees: war or peace?

IV TREES AND US.

The future with trees

Illustrations

Delightful line drawings (by Dawn Burford) include:

Baobab: "Big, hallow ... may double up as funeral parlors and cafes".
Banyan: forms "new trunks by sending down roots from above".
Beech: "One of the temperate world's most valued hardwoods".
Birch: "Fey, melancholic, and wonderfully hardy".
Bristlecone pine: "Some ... are as old as all written history".
Cacti: "Big cacti form veritable desert forests".
Cannonball tree: 20-centimeter (8-inch) diameter "fruits grow straight from the trunk". "The fruits break when they hit the ground to expose a bluish-green pulp, packed with seeds. To people the pulp smells foul, but peccaries ... love it."
Coastal redwood: "the height of a cathedral spire, 60 to 70 meters. The tallest ... 111 meters".
Cycads: "look like palms but are quite different".
Davidia, the lovely handkerchief tree: "each flower is flanked by two petals as big as your hand that look ... like rich, creamy-white leaves". A related family is Cornus which "includes the 45 species of dogwood".
Dicksonia: "Tree ferns once abounded. Some, like this Dicksonia, as still with us."
Dragon tree: "An arborescent relative of asparagus".
Fig: "750 species .... need their own wasps to pollinate them".
Ginkgo: "Now only one species remains".
Holly: "Handsome in winter and with fine white timber".
Judas tree: "Rounded-leaved and altogether beautiful".
Juniper: "The most widespread of all conifers".
Lodoicea, a palm of the Seychelles: produces "coco de mer ... the world's largest seed and a prodigious mariner", its seeds (like those of the coconut palm and the nipa palm) being dispersed by water.
Magnolia: "Beautiful but simple ... [may be] the most ancient flowering tree" with large but basic flowers.
Mangroves: can "grow with their feet in the sea"; thereby they "link the food webs of land and sea".
Ravenala: the "traveler's palm" "is related to ginger".
Royal palm: "may grow to 30 meters [90 feet]".
Teak: "grows slowly; it is traditionally harvested in India at eighty-year intervals".
Yew: "two thousand years to live".

1. Trees in mind: Simple questions with complicated answers

What is a tree? It's "a big plant with a stick up the middle -- or could be, if it grew in the right circumstances; or ..."
Why be a tree? Advantages include efficient metabolism and the production of vast quantities of seeds. "Trees are classic keystone species: simply by existing ..., they create niches where other creatures can live."
How many kinds of trees are there? Fascinating discussion of why this is complicated to answer and why nobody knows.

Still counting.

"biologists ... estimate that there are around 350,000 species of land plants in general. At least 300,000 of them are flowering plants. Around one-fifth of these are trees ... probably around 60,000 species of trees in the world ... Most of these species are in the tropics. ... The vast boreal forests of northern Canada are dominated by only nine species."

2: Keeping track

Who's who?
What's in a name?
The pros and cons of Latin and Greek.
Getting sorted.
The final road to modernity.

3: How trees became

Transformation 1: Life.
Transformation 2: Organisms.
Transformation 3: Modern-style cells.
Transformation 4: Organisms with many cells.
Transformation 5: Plants come on to land.
Transformation 6: Plants with 'vessels' -- and the first stirrings of wood.
Transformation 7: Plants with seeds.
Cycads, the ginkos, and the musterious gnetales: three noble also-rans.

4: Wood

5: Trees without flowers: the conifers

Who's who among the conifers.

6: Trees with flowers: Magnolias and other primitives

7: From palms and screw pines to yuccas and bamboos: the monocot trees

8: Thoroughly modern broadleaves

9: From oaks to mangoes: the glorious inventory of rose-like eudicots

10: From handkerchief trees to teak: the daisy-like eudicots

11: How trees live

Earth, water, air, and fire.
The problems of water.
The soil.
Strange soils: mangroves and outright toxicity.
How trees know what to do (and what to do next).
How trees shape themselves.
The past and the future: memory and anticipation.

12: Which trees live where, and why

Why trees live where they do.
And yet they moved.
Reality: A few case histories.
Why so many trees in the tropics.
A tale of three northerners.

13: The social life of trees: war or peace?

Animals as go-betweens.
Of figs and wasps.
Enter the nematodes.
Cool figs and hot figs.
Scattering of seed.
Why some figs have big fruits despite everything: the mystery solved.
The dodo and the tambalacoque: A sad tale with a fairly happy ending.
Life's torments -- and autumn colors.

14: The future with trees

The biggest challenge of all: Climate.
Water and soil: the particularities of rain and flood.
A world built on trees.
Forests and farming in tandem: the promise of agroforestry.
How to grow trees.
The right kind of science.
Wangari Maathai and the green belt movement.

Book Choice.

Sierra Nevada Tree Identifier. My First Summer in the Sierra
by John Muir.
Sierra Nevada: The Naturalist's Companion
by Verna R. Johnson. Published University of California Press.
The Ecology of Fire
by Robert J. Whelan. Fire in Sierra Nevada Forests: A Photographic Interpretation of Ecological Change Since 1849
by George E. Gruell.

Related pages.

Home and List of Articles.
By location in California:
By species:
- Conifer: How You Can Tell What Kind of Conifer You Have..
- Oak.
- Pines: Introducing Pines, How to Names Pines.
- Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum).

Forest and Tree Home,
Glossary pages: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z.

[Thanks for visiting.]

Sierra Nevada Tree Identifier.	My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir.
	Sierra Nevada: The Naturalist's Companion by Verna R. Johnson. Published University of California Press.
The Ecology of Fire by Robert J. Whelan.	Fire in Sierra Nevada Forests: A Photographic Interpretation of Ecological Change Since 1849 by George E. Gruell.