Ancient Trees: Trees That Live For 1,000 Years [Hardcover]

Anna Lewington (Author), Edward Parker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 31, 1999

"...engrossing and visually appealing...intended as a celebration of some of the world's oldest living trees....Trees from all around the world are represented...Parker's many beautiful, full-color images contribute a great deal, but what makes this book especially interesting is a discussion of the roles these trees have played through the ages in human religions, myths, economies, and everyday life....should appeal to a wide audience and is recommended for public, school, and undergraduate college libraries."--Library Journal. Published in Association with the World Wildlife Fund!

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This engrossing and visually appealing book is intended as a celebration of some of the world's oldest living trees. By the authors' own admission, it is not a definitive guide to all of the world's ancient trees. Lewington, an environmental and children's book writer, and photographer Parker have selected some of the nearly 100 species they have identified as living 1000 years or longer. Trees from all around the world are represented: redwood, bristlecone pine, Brazil nut, yew, oak, lime, olive, baobab, fig, cedar, ginkgo, and others. Parker's many beautiful, full-color images contribute a great deal, but what makes this book especially interesting is a discussion of the roles these trees have played through the ages in human religions, myths, economies, and everyday life. Ancient Trees should appeal to a wide audience and is recommended for public, school, and undergraduate college libraries.AWilliam H. Wiese, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Sterling; 1St Edition edition (December 31, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1855857049
• ISBN-13: 978-1855857049
• Product Dimensions: 12 x 9.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,138,079 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Even a coffee table book should have substance, August 2, 2000

By 

Ronald Lanner (Placerville, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ancient Trees: Trees That Live For 1,000 Years (Hardcover)

A book that justifies itself by focusing on the "ancientness" of its subjects must do two things if it is to be taken seriously as a contribution to knowledge. First, it must discuss the issue of longevity in trees in some depth, and tie that in with what is known or suspected about longevity in other organisms. If indeed this is a catalog of the ancient, then what can we make of it? What general truths emerge from the data? The author makes no serious attempt to synthesize the information she brings to light -- just some offhand comments in her introduction. This gives the reader little understanding of the biology of aging, or the causes of longevity. So we find here nothing to increase our understanding of those phenomena,just anecdotes about the trees chosen as examples. This is a missed opportunity. Second, the author owes her readers some certainty that the book's major facts are indeed facts. I do not quibble here about numerous small errors of botany or geography that should have been caught by a publisher's fact checker; but rather the facts that form the core of this book's purpose -- tree ages. Many of the trees that are featured here come from tropical or subtropical areas, where annual ring evidence is not available for aging trees. Thus no precise age can be determined. She mentions a few cases where radiocarbon dating has been done, but gives no citations to it in the bibliography, which contains few references of scientific value. Based on carbon dating of a 1,000 year-old tree, she blithely assumes that baobabs up to 4,000 years old are somewhere out there. Her most outrageous age data are "at least 5,000 years old, possibly 9,000 years old" for a yew in Scotland. This latter figure is almost double the precisely determined age of the oldest known bristlecone pine. If there is credible evidence the yew could be so ancient, any responsible author would cite it. She does not. This then is not a book whose "facts" can be trusted, or one that advances knowledge of its main subject.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Facinating and beautiful, June 12, 2000

By 

Lloyd A. Conway (Detroit) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ancient Trees: Trees That Live For 1,000 Years (Hardcover)

This book is a enthralling look at the world's oldest trees. Aside from the famed redwoods and bristlecone pines, how many know that limes can live over 1000 years, or that olive trees from Plato's time still yield their fruit in season? reading the chapters of this book send the mind wandering back across all of human history: the Tree of One Hundred Horses, an olive tree so huge that its' shade could cover literally a hundred head of horse, famous in Plato's time, has thrived at the foot of Mt. Etna, an active volcano, since nearly the dawn of history. Or, think of how there are cedars in Lebanon that were standing when Solomom's temple was built out of their brothers. The reverie and sense of awe that this tome's stories inspire are well worth the price. -Lloyd A. Conway

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars They lend to our lives a sense of timelessness, June 18, 2002

By 

Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ancient Trees: Trees That Live For 1,000 Years (Hardcover)

"If you've seen one redwood tree, you've seen them all." --Ronald Reagan

In "answer" to this stupidity by our ex-president, the authors of this attractive coffee table style book quote John Muir on page 7:

"Among all the varied productions with which Nature has adorned the surface of the earth, none awakens our sympathies, or interests our imagination so powerfully as those venerable trees which seem to have stood the lapse of ages, silent witnesses of the successive generations of man, to whose destiny they bear so touching a resemblance, alike in their budding, their prime, and their decay."

A tree that lives for a thousand years inspires awe and reverence. These are wonders of the world both modern and ancient. They need to be saved, and they need to be seen. I wish I could see them all. This book is as close as I'll ever get. I have, though, stood in the redwood forest of California and felt the sense of awe that so inspired Muir, a sense of being inside the sacred cathedral of nature. My senses were hushed and my spirit elevated. I wonder what Reagan thought when he stood there (as he undoubtedly did). Perhaps he wondered how many cubic feet of timber the tallest tree in the world might yield.

There are eighteen chapters, each devoted to different types of tree with specimens over a thousand years old, from the majestic redwood to the strange welwitschia, the "dwarf tree of the Namib desert," which reaches a height of only about five feet, and produces but a single pair of leaves in its lifetime, which can extend to two thousand years. Other chapters are devoted to fig trees, mighty oaks, sweet chestnuts, limes, olives, yews, cedar, gingko, the Montezuma Cypress, and of course the Bristlecone Pine, the oldest tree of all with one specimen, the Methuselah tree, said to be over 4,700 years old.

The colorful photographs from around the world by Edward Parker are beautiful, lavish and give us a sense of the enduring presence of the trees in their settings. There is a map of the world with numbered bullets to show locations.

The text, which tends to the cloying at times, alas, could use some work. Such boilerplate sentences as "Yet today, despite all the research that has taken place, the Amazon continues to be an awesome and mysterious place that holds many secrets" (p. 60) are all too frequent. Would that the text were more devoted to the simple sharing of factual information about the flowering of the trees, pollination, pollinators, seed dispersal, and perhaps about related species. The attempt to wed the trees to the ancient myths of indigenous peoples or to fix the "religious significance" of the trees has its place, but is takes up too much of the text here. I would prefer more information on the ecology of the trees. In the chapter on the majestic European limes, nowhere is it mentioned that these are not citrus trees! (Or am I the only one to think that a lime tree might be a citrus tree?)

The sometimes careless editing also detracts from the beauty of this book. While it may be forgiven that "gingko" is spelled two different ways ("gingko" and "ginkgo") on the same page (e.g., on pages, 19, 182, 183), it is not acceptable to have a photo of Brazilian nuts mistakenly identified as pods (p. 63). Additionally, on pages 30-31 a sentence is broken off and then there are three lines of repeated text.

In spite of these flaws this is a beautiful book that makes us feel in touch with nature and gives us a sense of the strength and endurance of living things.