Testament to trees

By Nara Schoenberg

Chicago Tribune (TNS)

The familiar floppy flowers of the magnolia tree are thought to be as old as the dinosaurs, which likely grazed among them.

The domestic apple tree, that staple of American culture and lore, actually traces its roots to the forests of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, where DNA has shown it descended from local fruit trees.

The English oak traversed the globe in the glory days of the British navy, when 3,700 trees were used to build a single warship.

Cedar, the timber of choice in the ancient Middle East, appears in the tombs of the pharaohs.

“It’s really quite astounding just how old our familiar trees are and how they’ve traveled around the world,” says Noel Kingsbury, author of the coffee-table book, “The Glory of the Tree: An Illustrated History” (Firefly), with photographs by Andrea Jones.

“Trees like the ginkgo, the metasequoia, which now have these incredibly restricted distributions in China, once covered most of the globe,” Kingsbury says.

Kingsbury, an expert on perennial garden plants, profiles 90 species of trees, including the tropical red mangrove, which stands above the ground on stiltlike roots; the prehistoric monkey puzzle tree that, with its spiky outstretched evergreen fingers, may well have been brontosaurus fodder; and the Japanese cherry tree with its pink puffball blossoms, which has only been widely grown in the U.S. for about 100 years.

The stories span ecology, world history, religion and popular culture.

Jones, a photographer who is as adept at capturing the majesty of an ancient oak and the wonder of a single seed pod, brings her subjects to life in hundreds of photos.

The book includes celebrated trees such as the California redwood and the bristlecone pine, which can live to more than 4,800 years old, and the relatively low-profile maples, elms and horse chestnuts that shade our backyards, parks and preserves.

“Trees are a bit like a lot of things in the landscape,” Kingsbury says. “We kind of take them for granted, and it’s only when they get blown down in a storm or get hit by a disease that people really wake up. We need to take more notice of them.”

Exhibit A might be the lovely American elm, which once presided over so many small-town streets.

“Few trees have played such a part in the shaping of urban environments or have had such a symbolic role in the history of a nation,” Kingsbury writes.

Native Americans often used the American elm as a council tree, William Penn signed a peace treaty under one in the 1600s, and a famous one in Boston became the rebellious colonists’ “Liberty Tree.”

The nation had an estimated 25 million American elms in the 1930s, including 600,000 in Minneapolis and 150,000 in Dallas, Kingsbury writes. But then disaster struck, in the form of Dutch elm disease. A shipment of infected timber had been imported from France, Kingsbury writes.

“Sadly, the spread of disease has meant that the American elm now seems to be something of a tree of the past,” Kingsbury writes.

Some cultures do tend to pay more attention to their trees than others.

Kingsbury writes of the Japanese tradition of Hanami, or cherry blossom viewing, when people picnic under the flowering trees. Hanami celebrates natural beauty, Kingsbury writes, and it offers a bittersweet chance to reflect on how fleeting that beauty can be.

Kingsbury says he hopes people come away from his book with a greater interest in protecting and preserving trees.

“I think we do have a situation where the world’s trees and forests face all sorts of dangers, and a greater awareness of trees could be very important. One particular issue is the trade in timber carrying diseases from one country to another. I’d known about the chestnut blight before, but in researching it for this book, it was just horrendous: 25 percent of the biomass of eastern North America dying in the space of a decade.”

He also suggests that tree lovers pay attention to the wood they buy for do-it-yourself projects.

“There are certain trees, the Douglas fir comes to mind, that can be sustainably harvested,” Kingsbury says.