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Twelve trees : the deep roots of our future / Daniel Lewis.

by Lewis, Daniel, 1959- author.

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New York : Avid Reader Press, 2024.

Trees -- Climatic factors.

Trees -- Ecophysiology.

Climatic changes.

9781982164058 (hardcover) :

1982164050 (hardcover) :

xvi, 279 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

First Avid Reader Press hardcover edition.

A book older than God: the great basin bristlecone pine -- Awesome matters: the coast redwood -- Earth work: the nearly lost tree of Rapa Nui -- Finding time: amber, insects, and a fossil tree -- Understory alliance: the longleaf pine and its fiery partners -- Making folk medicine modern: the road of the east Indian sandalwood tree -- A lawful lot of wood: central African forest ebony -- Belonging and beyond: the blue gum eucalyptus -- Slippery slopes: the olive tree and its fruit and oil -- Elephantine: the African baobab -- Waterlogged: the bald cypress and the wonders of wetlands -- Tall stories: the mighty ceiba tree -- Afterword: in praise of recording, reporting, and remembering.

"The world today is undergoing the most rapid environmental transformation in human history--from climate change to deforestation. Scientists, ethnobotanists, indigenous peoples, and collectives of all kinds are closely studying trees and their biology to understand how and why trees function individually and collectively in the ways they do. In Twelve Trees, Daniel Lewis, curator and historian at one of the world's most renowned research libraries, travels the world to learn about these trees in their habitats. Lewis takes us on a sweeping journey to plant breeding labs, botanical gardens, research facilities, deep inside museum collections, to the tops of tall trees, underwater, and around the Earth, journeying into the deserts of the American west and the deep jungles of Peru, to offer a globe-spanning perspective on the crucial impact trees have on our entire planet. When a once-common tree goes extinct in the wild but survives in a botanical garden, what happens next? How can scientists reconstruct lost genomes and habitats? How does a tree store thousands of gallons of water, or offer up perfectly preserved insects from millions of years ago, or root itself in muddy swamps and remain standing? How does a 5,000-year-old tree manage to live, and what can we learn from it? And how can science account for the survival of one species at the expense of others? To study the science of trees is to study not just the present, but the story of the world, its past, and its future."-- Publisher.

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