GENERAL

JAMESFLEMING

Tall, Dark and Handsome: Four Books about Trees

woodpecker; the hours of work that went into Silbury Hill (18 million); horse-mad Lesbos; the cyanide in apple pips – and the bat Don Bradman used for his record score of 334 against England in the third Test at Leeds in

THOMAS PAKENHAM’s fine new book, In Search of Remarkable Trees: On Safari in Southern Africa (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 192pp £25), is, like his others, essentially a Book of Marvels. He’s chosen some 100 of South Africa’s (and Madagascar’s) most spectacular trees – baobab, kokerboom, sausage tree, pod mahogany, fever tree, and so on – and illustrated each with photographs, sundry arboreal information and safari anecdotes. It’s a beguiling mixture. He’s especially good at wood uses. In a previous book we learned that the outer shell of the baobab is used for castanets. Now we find that it was up a sycamore fig that Zaccheus the publican climbed to see Jesus pass through Jericho; that the same wood was used for mummy cases; that lucky charms are made from the shiny red seeds of the coral tree. He has a good eye and ear. I enjoyed his description of a lion considering him for a meal as having a face ‘like a cross between that of Paul Kruger ... and the famous oval radiator of a Bugatti’. Did that come to him in the presence of the lion, I wonder? The book seems to have been compiled at speed, however. Fewer species of tree and a more reflective text might have been better. Roger Deakin’s Wildwood: A Journey through Trees (Hamish Hamilton 391pp £20) suffers in the opposite direction. The text is as thick as nectar but begs for something more substantial than a few line drawings. However, it is a wonderful book and stands proudly despite the publisher’s stinginess. Because of our soft climate, English culture, whether in prose, verse or art, has long existed in complete intimacy with Nature. Topsell, Evelyn, Gilbert White – well, at least that gets us to the eighteenth century. Let the late Roger Deakin take a place among that famous throng. I have read none of his previous books but on the evidence here he was incapable of being boring or commonplace, no matter whether he was describing the natural history of England or Australia or Poland or the vast walnut forests in the Ferghana Valley. (In respect of the last I was reminded of the work of another East Anglian naturalist, Douglas Carruthers.) In fact my notes are so extensive that I’m spoiled for examples of his breadth of learning. However, all readers will be grateful for knowing about: the etymology of our bizarre names for moths; the toes and tongue of the

The tree that Zaccheus climbed

1930. A good young bat should have no more than four grains in its face. His had ten. It was ancient. It could have splintered from the impact of any one of his shots and offered a catch. So wasn’t England unlucky! If the Pakenham is a Book of Marvels, this is a Book of Wonderment. Wildwoodsparkles in all directions and is none the worse for being worldly, tolerant and oldfashioned. It gave me real pleasure. Would that I could say the same for Richard Preston’s The Wild Trees: What If the Last Wilderness Is Above Our Heads?(Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 291pp £20). ‘Wild’ in this context means unclimbed and ‘tree’ means the Californian redwood, Sequoia sempervirens. The author would have us believe that he’s passionately interested in trees. But the tone is cold. It is as if he was casting round for a subject to follow up his previous book, The Hot Zone, and looking up saw the vague substance of a tree between him and the sun. For the record his book concerns the discovery, measurement and climbing of a succession of giant redwoods in California plus a snooty excursion to the Scots pines of Glen Affric. The only subject on which he threatens to become interesting is that of lichen and its various species. But there is neither force nor cogency in his remarks, which is a pity. To the birds with whom he perforce shares the canopy, I could find only one reference. The truth of the matter is that Zaccheus knew more about the value of tree-climbing than Preston. Finally, is the tree of Zaccheus a sycamore fig or a sycomore fig? Only in D J Mabberley’s The Plant-Book: A Portable Dictionary of the Vascular Plants can the correct answer to this and a million other botanical questions be found. (His answer, supported by the 1993 SOED but not by Pakenham, is that the word ‘sycomore’ has one application and one only: to Ficus sycomorus.) No brief mention can do justice to this book, first published in 1987. An updated edition was published last year. The pith of the book was compiled on the dense-thicket lines of Clapham, Tutin and Warburg – ‘Bletia: Ruiz &

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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