Trees as Witnesses of Yesterday and Inspiration for Tomorrow; A Review of Jonathan Drori’s Around the World in 80 Trees
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by Rob Mann
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Japanese lacquerware is prized for its intricate beauty and surprising durability, but there is a particularly gruesome anecdote in the history of the craft. The sap from the Chinese lacquer tree, on which the eponymous art form depends, is filtered and heat-treated before it hardens to form a clear, waterproof surface. In the age before plastics, lacquering was a process of high-technology. But the sap is also frighteningly toxic. The lacquer tree is a cousin of North American poison ivy, and an oily substance in the sap used to make lacquerware can cause severe dermatitis. It is hardly the stuff one would dare make a beverage from, but that is exactly what a sect of monks in northern Japan decided to do. The monks were intent on becoming sokushinbutsu, or ‘living Buddhas,’ and judged correctly that the sap’s ability to dehydrate and harden wood and resist decay could also be used to embalm an animal. In their case, the animals were the monks themselves. The ascetics began by steadily reducing their diet to only seeds, nuts, and roots, all consumed with a steady flow of tea made from the lacquer’s sap. The excruciating process took years, but for many of them it worked, and the bodies of several of these self-mummified monks are still on display in temples deep in the forests of Japan.
In his 2018 book Around the World in 80 Trees, Jonathan Drori, a trustee at the Eden Project in London, weaves this story with tales of gravity-defying goats, the origins of aspirin, and others from around the globe into a cohesive narrative about the majesty of nature, and the fragility of humanity’s relationship with it. That the common thread through these varied stories is trees is the real magic of this book. Trees—so ubiquitous, so overlooked, but so present in our lives—turn out to make wonderful characters.
80 Trees is constructed as a series of separate but mutually relevant short stories, each dedicated to an individual species, beginning geographically in Drori’s native England before jaunting east across the globe. We learn a bit of the physical and biological character each of these 80 trees, and slowly the stories unfold about the trees themselves, and more interestingly about the people, animals, and insects that connect with them. Each tree story is rooted in a location important to the species. Some of the connections are familiar, such as Egypt’s date palms, or the Banyan trees of India, though for many others, even the trees’ common names belie their place in history. To learn what makes the Norway spruce so special, we are taken not to the forests outside Oslo, but rather to northern Italy. For it is there around Cremona, in the late 17th century, that a craftsman named Stradivari discovered the wood of that spruce was perfectly balanced in stiffness and density, making it ideal for soundboards in musical instruments. The legendary violins that still bear the Stradivarius name are the results of that discovery, and any symphony-goer today owes some gratitude to Stradivari for understanding how the tree’s unique properties allowed the production of instruments of such incomparable sound.
Books that promise “the world” through any single lens are often predictably hyperbolic or contrived. An entire genre of popular history books attempts to reduce all that is relevant in our known world into a single origin story, be it of the codfish or the Scottish people. Drori though has flipped the premise, and offers us a new perspective of world history and culture though one persistent and quiet witness, the tree. The result is a book that is far grander, illuminating, and more wandering in scope than his title suggests. Though that title reads too much like a publisher’s attempt to capitalize off a pun, it is the only dab of convention in what is otherwise a remarkably novel collection of stories. Ultimately, Jules Verne’s Around The World in 80 Days even proves a worthy cousin here, for Drori too leads us on a world adventure, from the Horn of Africa’s Incense Route, through the nickel mines of New Caledonia, to the broad, blue jacaranda-lined boulevards of Argentinian cities.
Drori grew up in west London exploring the nearby Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. His father would tell Drori and his brother stories about the plants as they tromped through the gardens, and even allowed the young Drori to once taste an opium poppy, something which prompted a social worker’s visit to the family home after Drori relayed the event casually to his school teacher. His love of plants and trees deepened as a career in writing and broadcasting on the subject blossomed, and Drori took particular satisfaction in finding a language to relay the joy and magic of botany to a lay audience.
Fittingly for a book that delivers one unexpected surprise after another, I discovered 80 Trees by happenstance, not on an algorithm-driven recommended list, but in a small shop in San Francisco that caters to gardeners. The book caught my attention because I had spent much of the preceding year since moving to the city buying book after book about flora in a itinerant attempt to play David Attenborough to my two young sons. Our arrival in California in the summer of 2020 coincided with my recognition of the need be a better educator to my children, particularly since most schools and museums were shuttered, but my kids remained as thirsty as ever for new stimuli. I had learned to mirror the boys’ interest in dinosaurs and fire trucks easily enough, but what I really wanted to share with them, to get them genuinely excited about, was nature. And nothing in the natural world has captivated me so much as trees.
As we explored our new city, I was constantly marveling at the planted rows of eucalyptus trees in the Presidio, the Monterey cypress forest at Land’s End, and the dense, tangled canopy provided by our neighborhood’s California laurels. When I began trying to identify so many species unknown to me, I was taken back to the seminal moment in what started my obsession with trees: my 4th grade science project. The project simply required me to identify and classify five species each of deciduous and evergreen trees around my hometown of Eugene, Oregon, but it remained for decades my proudest moment in science. Admittedly, a glance at my report cards from high school and college shows that there was little competition for this title. I was mostly a lousy student of the physical and biological sciences, but my lack of scholastic talent never dampened my love of trees, and for a time I even welcomed the association people often made about what natives of my home state were rumored to hug.
By the fall of 2020, I became convinced that my kids might easily share this passion if they just knew a bit more about the trees around us. I began scrambling through our neighborhood in San Francisco, flailing in my use of apps, books, and laminated pamphlets to identify every tree in sight and tell them about it. But while my tree fever only grew with each new specifies correctly identified, I struggled to make it compelling for my sons. I had plenty of details about trees: their native origin, fruit, leaf composition, germination habits, etc. But my facts were all monochrome, and my kids were craving color. I needed tree stories.
I did not bother to read 80 Trees in any order; there is little need to, and the book yields well to the reader’s interest to hop around the globe or cherry-pick passages about favorite species. Drori’s prose glides through time and space with ease, and he fully exploits the innate richness of the arborist’s vocabulary. Whether the “serotinous cones” of Canada’s lodgepole pine, the “juicy sarcotesta” of Iran’s pomegranate, or the highly evocative name itself of Utah’s quaking aspen, the book is a constant reminder of the beautiful language of botany. Finland’s silver birch features “cascades of delicate, pendulous branches that sway in the breeze,” and its “fluttering leaves are pale-green diamonds, serrated and borne on slender twigs, warty from their resin glands.”
Drori manages to not overwhelm with scientific detail, but uses it judiciously to add depth to already captivating stories. For example, about the legend of poisonous upas trees in the East Indies, a species referenced by Dickens and Pushkin as a metaphor for deadly evil, Drori explains that while animals eat the tree’s fruit and local people use its inner bark to make clothes, the legend of its poisonous nature began with a element of truth. “In what are now Malaysia and Indonesia, upas means ‘poison’, and the tree’s latex does contain deadly cardiac glycosides. These chemicals, if they enter the bloodstream, interfere with the heart, making the beats weak and irregular before stopping them altogether. The latex can be collected, heated to a viscous paste and applied to blowpipe darts that are still used by tribal people for catching supper.” The local people wanted to hide the genuine nature of the tree’s poison from Dutch invaders, so they crafted tales about the upas alleging that just to look at the tree was folly. Europeans arriving on Borneo were told they needed to always keep the wind at their back when approaching an upas so the tree’s poison could be carried away. Stories of the tree’s dangerous properties proliferated among the more influential and learned visitors who reached Southeast Asia, and because the accounts were relayed back to European capitals by respected men of society, the true source of the upas’ poison remained secret for 400 years. As Drori concludes, “As propagandists have always known, our wish to believe the unbelievable knows no bounds."
Drori’s storytelling is married splendidly with hundreds of illustrations by Lucille Clerc, a French-born artist who now spends most of her time in England, drawing the same gardens of Drori’s youth. Clerc’s affection for the subject matter is no less obvious than the writer’s. Working with a palate of soft greens, blues, and greys, her muted tones compliment the intricate detail produced in her fine lines. Close-ups of leaves, branch patterns, and cross-sections of fruit are true and scientific renderings, but somehow still manage to flatter. For the images in this book, Clerc made screen printings of her pencil and biro drawings. She’s refined this technique over years of creating images of architecture, animals, botany, and mythology, and typically does her own printing by hand at her studio in London or in the family’s artist shed back in northern France. Many of her most celebrated images are surrealist renderings of nature and modernity at harmony, or more often, locked in metaphorical struggle to share space on a canvas. The images in 80 Trees eschew this abstraction and remain largely realistic, but Clerc’s gift for placing humanity and nature together in a single image is on full display. Her drawings of the now extinct Timucua tribespeople performing a tea ceremony in the shade of the yaupon tree, or the revealers enjoying the blossoms under Japan’s yoshino cherry, leave the reader little doubt about how these trees interact with, and often define, aspects of culture.
During the couple times I attempted to use this book as a field manual and took it outside to open the renderings up before their genuine selves, even my toddler could not help but react to the book’s beauty. No image has captivated his young mind quite like that of Morocco’s argan tree. Clerc shows a single tree, with no background but a simple halo of blue sky. From its stout trunk radiate branches as far horizontally as upwards, and the argan is fully leaved and its fruit must be ripe. We can assume this because scattered throughout the branches of this modest tree, no taller than 10 meters, are more than a dozen goats. The goats, Drori explains, negotiate precarious limbs and savage thorns to reach the argan’s fruit, and play an integral role in the production of argan oil that is extracted from the seeds they spit out.
For a writer who wants people to better understand the trees we share the planet with, it makes sense Drori also affords space in his stories to advocate for progress in other aspects of the human condition. In his explanation of the prominent role the olive plays across cultures in the Middle East, he cannot help but highlight how this unifying aspect of society is so tragically at odds with the geopolitics of the region. In telling us about the singularity and wonder of the bark on cork oak trees, Drop rebukes modern assumptions that the continual harvesting of cork for the wine industry is ecologically damaging, explaining how in fact the removal of some bark is necessary to keep the ecosystem healthy and thriving, and is vital to the economy of rural Portugal. We learn how Chile’s monkey puzzle tree, with ferociously sharp leaves that were adapted to fend off the likes of the Stegosaurus, is now endangered due to agricultural demands on the land. “The real puzzle now is how to conserve a tree that outlasted the dinosaurs but must compete for space with man.” As the book progresses, Drori’s social commentary and environmental premonitions seem to resonate louder. Rather than distract the reader, because Drori has already proven the depth of his understanding of the arboreal ecosystem, there is real authenticity and authority in his advocacy. Drori implores us to understand more, rather than preach for us to adopt a particular position, and the distinction in tone allows the reader to stay engaged and want to turn the page.
As Drori’s career advanced and he became more active in environmental stewardship through positions at the Woodland Trust and Worldwide Fund for Nature, he also embraced a more prominent platform for sharing his views about humanity’s delicate relationship with trees and other plant life. Drori gained some fame through a pair of TED talks on seeds and on pollen, and managed to succeed in finding a new audience to take interest in subjects often overlooked even in environmentalist circles. His wife, renowned novelist Tracy Chevalier, shared in a 2018 interview how, “Young people will see [Drori] and yell, "Hey plant guy!" "Seed guy!" which makes him happy; he feels if the next generation understands why trees are important, then our future is more secure.”
A few days before finishing this review, my wife brought some flowers home from the grocery store. The market’s selection was bountiful, and she chose to build her own bouquet, mixing some blue irises with yellow calla lilies, and adding in a few sprigs of eucalyptus for fragrance. Our eldest son, Leo, rushed over to the flowers as soon as she put them out, exclaiming how wonderful the flowers smelled before pulling off bits of eucalyptus leaf to rub between his fingers. He then ran to me as I was trying to write this, shoved his fingers in my nose so I too could enjoy that sweet, all-too-familiar musky scent, and told me how these are the leaves that koalas love. Before I even realized the connection between his exuberance and what I was trying to write, I responded by telling him about a very special kind of eucalyptus tree in Australia called the jarrah, which has a wood so strong that it was once used to pave the streets of some of the finest cities in the world. He was intrigued by this, trying to imagine streets of wood and not the asphalt that loves to skin his knees and scratch up his bike. I explained what I had just learned from Drori about how jarrah trees had been cut into logs and carefully laid in the streets for horses and carts to ride over. Leo asked where in San Francisco we could see these wooden streets, and I tried to keep him hopeful, explaining that while the wooden streets are long gone, there still stand plenty of groves of cousins of the jarrah only a couple blocks from our house, trees that are the particular favorite of his beloved koala. And with the next four words, “Can we go now?”, I felt the real power of Drori’s stories.
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Around the World in 80 Trees. By Jonathan Drori, Lucille Clerc (illustrator). Laurence King Publishing; 240 pages; $24.99.