Enduring Roots: Encounters with Trees, History, and the American Landscape [Hardcover]

Gayle Brandow Samuels (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 1999

Winner of the National Arbor Day Foundation's Media Award "Enduring Roots is beautifully written; always engaging, often lyrical. The research underlying the stories is impressive. . . . Samuels presents her stories in their historical roundness rather than spinning yarns from a few selected bits of evidence, as landscape history sometimes does. This is a competent and compelling work that encourages us to make moral choices about which stories we take to heart."-The Journal of American History Trees are the grandest and most beautiful plant creations on earth. From their shade-giving, arching branches and strikingly diverse bark to their complex root systems, trees represent shelter, stability, place, and community as few other living objects can. Enduring Roots tells the stories of historic American trees, including the oak, the apple, the cherry, and the oldest of the world's trees, the bristlecone pine. These stories speak of our attachment to the land, of our universal and eternal need to leave a legacy, and demonstrate that the landscape is a gift, to be both received and, sometimes, tragically, to be destroyed. Each chapter of this book focuses on a specific tree or group of trees and its relationship to both natural and human history, while exploring themes of community, memory, time, and place. Readers learn that colonial farmers planted marker trees near their homes to commemorate auspicious events like the birth of a child, a marriage, or the building of a house. They discover that Benjamin Franklin's Newtown Pippin apples were made into a pie aboard Captain Cook's Endeavour while the ship was sailing between Tahiti and New Zealand. They are told the little-known story of how the Japanese flowering cherry became the official tree of our nation's capital-a tale spanning many decades and involving an international cast of characters. Taken together, these and many other stories provide us with a new ways to interpret the American landscape. Gayle Brandow Samuels is an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches in the Masters of Environmental Studies Program. She is the principal author of Women in the City of Brotherly Love . . . And Beyond.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

If there is a middle ground between wilderness and civilization, a place where nature and humankind can be reconciled, historian Gayle Samuels suggests, it is to be found in an orchard. "Orchards," she writes, "combine the seeming opposites of ... forest and town, spontaneity and calculation" to offer the best of both worlds.

In her elegant meditation on the trees of North America, Samuels looks closely at the role of managed nature in our history. She turns to such exhibits as the "wild apples" Henry David Thoreau celebrated (which were simply escapees from New England orchards); the Charter Oak of Connecticut, honored for its role in revolutionary history, some 10,000 pieces of which were distributed around the country when the tree died in 1856; and the work of John Chapman, "Johnny Appleseed," who planted countless thousands of European trees throughout Ohio and Indiana. Samuels deepens our knowledge of commonplace events, writing, for instance, of the double-blossom cherry trees that grace the Tidal Basin of Washington, D.C., a gift of the Japanese government in the early 20th century--but, Samuels adds, a gift meant to persuade the United States to keep its doors open to Japanese immigration.

Ardent arboriculturalists and students of cultural history alike will welcome Samuels's graceful book. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

In a delightful crazy-quilt of American studies, Samuels (Women in the City of Brotherly Love... and Beyond) focuses on treesAin the natural environs and in U.S. historyAto explore the intersection of the past with the present. She begins with the Charter Oak in Hartford, Conn., which was given a hero's funeral in 1856. This revered white oak served as a meeting place for generations of Native Americans; according to legend, beleaguered colonists hid Connecticut's liberal charter in its hollowed trunk in 1687. Trees are woven into the fabric of our national saga in surprising ways, explains Samuels. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Jefferson grew apple orchards; Benjamin Franklin launched an export industry by introducing the Newtown Pippin apple into England. Samuels delineates the battle of prairie and heartland trees against drought, fungus, freezes and, through the 1980s, against legislation aimed at banning species fallen out of favor. She explains how the Japanese flowering cherry tree came to grace the PotomacAa complex tale of politics, pest control and cross-cultural exchange featuring Commodore Perry, President Taft, Nancy Reagan and Japanese rulers eager to root their national symbol in Washington's official landscape. Samuels shuttles fluidly between ecology, botany, folklore, poetry, travelogue (including her own trips to California's majestic, four-millennia-old sequoias and bristlecone pines) and sociological researchAwhich reports, for example, that the presence of trees reduces urban violence and enhances suburban communities' feelings of cohesion. Her essays comprise both an uplifting meditation on trees and an unusual investigation of the American cultural landscape. 38 b&w illus. (Dec.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 214 pages
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press (December 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081352721X
• ISBN-13: 978-0813527215
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,954,226 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enduring Roots - an engaging exploration, February 27, 2000

By 

charlotte kidd (Philadelphia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Enduring Roots: Encounters with Trees, History, and the American Landscape (Hardcover)

As one who feels trees and words have amazing power and mystique, I believe Gayle Samuels pays high tribute to them both in Enduring Roots: Encounters with Trees, History, and the American Landscape. With intense passion and deft pen, Samuels lyrically brings the reader along on her journey to explore trees - from their physical structure to their integral place in our personal, natural, and national histories. Her vibrant writing evokes the emotional, the logical, and the visceral. The pages are rich with self-discovery, hands-on exploration, extensive research, and hard science. Her descriptions are clear and solid; so much so that reading, for example, about the majesty of the aged bristlecone pines and ancient oaks raises goosebumps.

Enduring Roots is not too sappy, not too woody; it's Just Right for everyone!