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Binding: HardcoverDewey Decimal Number: 582.16 EAN: 9780393049114 ISBN: 0393049116 Label: W. W. Norton & Company Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 192 Publication Date: September 30, 2002 Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Studio: W. W. Norton & Company Editorial Review: Product Description: A landmark volume celebrating the most remarkable trees on our planet. The spirit of nineteenth-century naturalistic exploration lives in British historian Thomas Pakenham, who has spent the last decade chronicling the lives of the world's most dramatic trees, many of which are in danger of destruction. After the world-wide success of his previous work, Meetings With Remarkable Trees—a stunning collection of 60 individual trees (and groups of trees) in Britain and Ireland chosen for their unusually strong personalities—Pakenham decided to hunt down and photograph another 60 remarkable trees scattered throughout the globe. Many of these trees were already famous-champions by girth, height, volume or age-while others had never previously been caught by the camera. Pakenham's five-year odyssey, sweating it out with a 30 pound Linhof camera and tripod, took him to most of the temperate and many of the tropical regions of the world. Although North American trees dominate this book, Pakenham also trekked to remote regions in Mexico, all over Europe, parts of Asia including Japan, northern and southern Africa, Madagascar, Australia and New Zealand. Despite his expert knowledge, the book owes little to conventional botany. Like its predecessor, Remarkable Trees of the World is arranged according to the characters of the trees themselves. There are Giants and Dwarfs, Methuselahs, Shrines, Dreams, Lovers and Dancers, Ghosts and Trees in Peril. The chief Giant is General Sherman in the Sierra Nevada, California. At over 1400 tons, the grizzled old general, a giant-sequoia, is the world's largest tree, measured by volume - indeed the largest single living thing in the world. The height record, however, goes to another commanding Californian, a 368-foot high Coast redwood recently declared the tallest tree in the world. Among the Methuselahs, Pakenham describes the wind-blasted bristlecone pines of the White Mountains of California. One of them, Old Methuselah himself, was found to be 4,600 years old, making him the oldest tree yet measured by scientists. Shrines include some of the holiest trees in the world, like the immense camphor trees preserved in Shinto shrines in Japan and the 2,200 year old Bo-tree in Sri Lanka, a cutting from the actual tree under which Buddha found enlightenment. Trees in Peril are the trees under attack by predatory loggers and impoverished farmers, including the exotic baobabs of Madagascar, now threatened by intensive farming, and the Great Spruce and Douglas Fir and Redcedars of Pacific North America in whose defense the conservationists have been fighting the loggers for decades. Remarkable Trees of the World is a magnificent work that celebrates the investigative genius of Thomas Pakenham. It will be treasured for generations by all those who marvel at the wonders of nature. Average Rating:
 Rating: - Pakenham does it again!His abiding love of trees is evident in this deeply personal account of trees he's found and ...respected enough to photograph, research and write about. I bought this because we already had "Meetings with Remarkable Trees" and we were in no way disappointed. The photos are excellent, the trees selected really are remarkable, and the narrative is engaging. Not much else to say, both my husband and I love the book, and it's on the coffee table right now. We have had guests pick it up and also fall ... Read More Rating:  - Beautiful bookA very nice book, with remarkable trees, however, from the cover I suppose I wrongly assumed they would be beautiful trees. Quite a lot of the book is spent on African trees of a very strange nature, and to my husband's suprise, very little was done on the banyan tree. I was looking forward to large, ancient trees myself. All in all, it is still a wonderful book, it just wasn't what we were expecting. Rating: - You Need to SeeGreat Book will enough the wonder hopefully they have it in the school systems or county systems Rating: - This is a coffee table book with pictures that impressTrees are grouped by various, sensible categories that other books on trees might neglect: Giants: Gods, Goddesses, Grizzlies; Dwarfs: For Fear of Little Men, In Bondage; Methuselahs: The Living and the Dead, Shrines; Dreams: Prisoners, Aliens, Lovers and Dancers, Snakes and Ladders, Ghosts; and Trees in Peril: Do the Loggers always Win? and Ten Green Bottles. Pakenham's text is great fun to read, as can be viewed from those sectional titles, and individual tree titles such as "Tie up my feet, Darling, ... Read More Rating: - Go gingko goIn fall 2006, Lansing's forestry department planted a tiny gingko biloba tree between the sidewalk and the street in front of my house. It had four and a half branches, all oriented in one plane like the candlesticks in a menorah. You could barely roast a wiener with it. I scrambled into the house for a book I had bought, by sheer coincidence, the previous day -- Thomas Pakenham's "Remarkable Trees of the World." Yes! There, sprawling across pages 110 and 111, was a gingko nearly 1,000 years ... Read More |
