The Wild Trees - BookWyrm

Hardcover, 294 pages

English language

Published Sept. 12, 2007 by Random House.

ISBN:: 978-1-4000-6489-2
OCLC Number:: 71005885

(4 reviews)

Hidden away in foggy, uncharted rain forest valleys in Northern California are the tallest organisms the world has ever sustained--the coast redwood trees. 96% of the ancient redwood forests have been logged, but the fragments that remain are among the great wonders of nature. The biggest redwoods can rise more than thirty-five stories above the ground, forming cathedral-like structures in the air. Until recently, the canopy at the tops of these majestic trees was undiscovered. Writer Preston unfolds the story of the daring botanists and amateur naturalists that found a lost world above California, dangerous, hauntingly beautiful, and unexplored. The deep redwood canopy is a vertical Eden filled with mosses, lichens, spotted salamanders, hanging gardens of ferns, and thickets of huckleberry bushes, all growing out of massive trunk systems, sometimes hollowed out by fire. Thick layers of soil sitting on limbs harbor animal and plant life unknown to science.--From publisher …

Hidden away in foggy, uncharted rain forest valleys in Northern California are the tallest organisms the world has ever sustained--the coast redwood trees. 96% of the ancient redwood forests have been logged, but the fragments that remain are among the great wonders of nature. The biggest redwoods can rise more than thirty-five stories above the ground, forming cathedral-like structures in the air. Until recently, the canopy at the tops of these majestic trees was undiscovered. Writer Preston unfolds the story of the daring botanists and amateur naturalists that found a lost world above California, dangerous, hauntingly beautiful, and unexplored. The deep redwood canopy is a vertical Eden filled with mosses, lichens, spotted salamanders, hanging gardens of ferns, and thickets of huckleberry bushes, all growing out of massive trunk systems, sometimes hollowed out by fire. Thick layers of soil sitting on limbs harbor animal and plant life unknown to science.--From publisher description.

2 editions

AliCorbin reviewed The Wild Trees by Richard Preston

Review of 'The Wild Trees' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Most people liked it. Some people loved it. It was full of interesting factoids, that I never would have guessed. (Like how much fertilizer falls out of a redwood tree in the form of lichen. And that redwoods can grow roots at their tops, absorb water out of their own rotting flesh, and send it down to the roots.) Some liked the style, of 'narrative nonfiction', that made it feel like a novel, while others felt that the narrative flow only served to point out the deficiencies of the 'plot', with minor characters introduced and then thrown away when they got too far from the major 'characters'.