FLORA & FAUNA

S TEPHEN A NDERTON A FOREST OF DELIGHTS

T HE S ECRET L IFEOF T REES : H OW T HEY L IVEAND W HY T HEY M ATTER

★By Colin Tudge (Allen Lane 451pp £20)

O AK : T HE F RAMEOF C IVILIZATION

★

By William Bryant Logan (W W Norton and Co 336pp £16.99)

A TTHETIME I read Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time I understood his explanations of astrophysics, but was quite unable to repeat them afterwards. Others have said the same. But physics is not easy – some minds can do it and others not; and however good the writer, the substance will not necessarily stick. Colin Tudge’s explanation of evolutionary botany, The Secret Life of Trees, definitely sticks. Botany and biology, you might say, are more tangible than physics, more immediate to the senses, and therefore easier to assimilate than physics. True enough, but still they have great complexities, and Tudge can make them not just understood but compelling reading too. Tudge sets out his stall as ‘science in the service of appreciation, and appreciation in the service of reverence which, in the face of wonders that are not of our making, is our only proper response’. When writing about the wonders of nature it is hard to avoid lapsing into the ‘Fancy that!’ style of narrative, as one fascinating fact succeeds another. Tudge avoids it no better than anyone else, although he manages not to make pile-ups of them. Fascinating they certainly are: sandalwood, for instance, is a parasite of the strychnine plant which in turn is related to our common buddleia; a diesel tractor can run perfectly well on oil pressed from the jatropha; hollow baobab trees are not uncommonly used as the final resting place for corpses, which mummify there in the dry heat. But there is much more to the book than tit-bits. It is in a sense four books. The first – ‘What is a Tree?’ – deals with the evolution of trees from the primal swamp, the value of sexual reproduction, and why trees find it useful simply to be so big. The second – ‘All the Trees of the World’ – is a heavyweight catalogue of the taxon

Balanophage at rest

omy of trees according to modern science and the links suggested by DNA. Tudge marches through the various families pointing out species of commercial or pharmaceutical significance. It is the third book – ‘The Life of Trees’ – that most people will find gripping. Tudge explains in detail how each of the 750 species of fig has its own dedicated wasp to aid fertilisation, how in Canada the jack pine is adapted to reproduce in response to forest fires, and how the great coastal redwoods of California cope with being smothered every few hundred years by deposits of silt. He answers questions which you never think to ask: why do conifers in high latitudes have downswept branches while those in tropical latitudes have flatter, tiered branches, for instance? The answer is, because the trees must take optimum advantage of the angle of sunlight. In the fourth book – ‘The Future with Trees’ – Tudge gets down to the nitty-gritty of climate change and how thoughtlessly man is treating the planet. He comes to the conclusion that ‘What matters in the end is politics’. It’s not comfortable reading, and Tudge’s occasional touches of jolly humour evaporate. This is what he has been dying to say for the past 350 pages; it’s his ‘proper response’ again. Curious, however, that someone who has written with such even-handed joy about evolution should suddenly be quite so angry at the possibility of further extinctions because of climate change. Where is the book on the morality of extinctions? In an atheistic age which gives man no God-given supremacy on earth, why should he last for ever? There is a book worth writing. There is no talk of hugging trees in the extraordinary little book, Oak: The Frame of Civilization, but I feel sure that Logan is a tree-hugger. He offers the exact opposite of Tudge’s book: a hymn of conversational praise of oak trees (almost any species, it seems, will do). Logan, an American who is confessedly neither botanist nor historian, touches on many scientific issues (evolution, the migration of species, reproduction), but his aim is to persuade the world to love oaks. Logan is convinced that the acorn was the springboard for all human civilisation and has proudly coined his own word for acorn-eaters: balanophages. There is even a suggestion that Adam and Eve were officially permitted to eat acorns and that only the apple tree was banned. Some chunks of the book are written as dialogue: for instance Logan with his oak-felling Jewish neighbour Mrs Kornbluth, or Logan trying to find acorn flour in a Korean supermarket without knowing the Korean word for acorn: ‘Unwilling to go away empty-handed, I rum

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

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