Customer Reviews

Teaching the Trees

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In this slender volume of short essays, gracefully accompanied by the illustrations of 19th century naturalist and artist John Abbot, Maloof makes her impassioned plea for the lives of trees and forests by introducing them to us one by one.

Local rambles in Maryland provide the settings for her meditations on the lives and strategies of common species like beech, oak, maple, pine, and sycamore and under story trees like dogwood and holly, as well as bald cypress, walnut, redcedar, sweetgum and more. She breathes in the special qualities of "old-growth" air and mourns the lack of "grandfather trees," but most fascinating are the tales of interwoven life in the trees.

Many of these have to do with insects. Black locusts produce extra nectar, which feeds the ants and ladybugs that protect the tree from other insects. Except aphids, which the ants protect in exchange for their "honeydew," a euphemism for aphid urine. Ladybugs eat aphids, but there are still plenty of them and that honeydew is also the substance found all over your car when you park it under a tree, that stuff you probably call sap.

Exploring the teeming life of a tree (without the sycamore alone nine other species would be lost) Maloof, a biologist, distills numerous studies and traces the relationships among the insects, lizards, fungi, mammals, birds and people who obtain benefit from the tree. With a winning combination of science and poetry, Maloof makes her case for compassion and wonder.

--Portsmouth Herald

When I was young, my neighbor told me that when she was a child in early 20th century Philadelphia, she thought that a tree was a particular kind of plant and that was that. Imagine her amazement the first time she left the city and discovered that there were what seemed to be an infinite variety of trees!

Joan Maloof takes the reader to the next level. She explains that far from each tree being merely a unique organism, that each tree is an entire ecosystem; indeed, that each tree is an interdependent universe of organisms that depend on each other in the most unimaginably wonderful and intricate ways.

I have spent my entire life in a rural area surrounded by trees, yet reading this book awakened a new curiosity, a new appreciation, a need to explore and learn that I never felt before.

Anyone will be enriched by reading "Teaching the Trees", but for the young person steeped in consumer culture who thinks that trees are for shade or lumber and that "bugs" are pests, it could be a life-changing experience, leading to an appreciation of the wonders of the forest, and perhaps a lifetime of study and enjoyment of the miracles of nature.

This is one of those books you read and it can change your life. It's an intellectually beautiful read by a biologist who has spent her life studying the relationship of trees, forests, organisms, insects and animals and explains their connections simply. I think it's an important book such as Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring". It should be in everyone's library and read over and over.

Tiia-Mai Barrett, Seattle, WA

Biologist Joan Maloof's ventures into the forests of the Eastern United states provide a series of lively, scientific essays on connections between tree species and the animals and insects which use it in Teaching The Trees: Lessons From The Forest. In leaving lab for direct environmental observation, Maloff's firsthand observations are lively and personal as well as scientific, exploring some of her favorite trees and their importance.

This is the type of book you savor, that you close your eyes at the end and feel you've received a special gift. I'm buying copies for my friends and family.

This is about teaching what the tress have to offer to other students of nature. It's really learning from the trees. Reminds me of the talking tree episode from 'Northern Exposure'. Reading this book makes a walk in the woods a spiritual experience. Even breathing their scent is something that inspires awe.

This book consists of a series of vignettes. Each is an evocative sketch of the author's interactions with trees and the animals that depend upon them. More than anything else, these prose poems make you feel the author's love of these trees and the intricate web of life. I say "feel" because after reading the chapter on black locust, I swear that I can smell the blossoms that draw so many bees. Likewise when I read her section about the hues of translucent green under the beech I could see the verdant stained glass. Quite simply, this book compelled me to savor it. I read a chapter each night before bed and had my dreams dappled with the magic of leaves.

I found this book disappointing. In several instances the author talks about great trees or forests that she had never seen, but were only a few miles from her. What I found most disgusting was that she used the names of those killed in New York during 911 in a ploy to save a plot of trees. She talks big, but acts little.