The Secret Life of Trees: How They Live and Why They Matter is a 2005 popular science book by Colin Tudge about the essential and precarious role of trees in our world. It was published in 2008 by the Folio Society, which is the edition I’ll be looking at here.
The plain green slipcase is a fairly standard Folio Society offering. It perhaps feels a little flimsy for this fairly substantial volume, although it shows no signs of failing under the strain. The book is bound in a hard-wearing green buckram to a design by Neil Packer. It is printed in a wrap-around fashion with black tree silhouettes overlaid with a selection of leaves, seeds and flowers blocked in gilt. The title is blocked on the spine and the volume has custom printed endpapers featuring tree rings—a very nice touch.
The text is set in Garamond to a fairly classical typographic design that is an apt reminder of all those old Victorian biological treatises. It’s perhaps a little dense on the page, but there’s a lot to fit in.
The paper is a stock called Gardapat. This is an uncommon choice for Folio Society and its bright white colouration and satin finish might upset those used to a more matte and tactile paper. But this finish is a necessary sacrifice in order to accommodate the profusion of photographic illustrations throughout the book. I counted 83 images in the main text, averaging to a photograph every 4 pages. There are also occasional diagrams, mostly to illustrate taxonomical classifications. Like many semi-gloss photographic papers, the Gardapat makes this a heavy volume that can be tiresome to hold for extended reading sessions. But the weight has the advantage that the book doesn’t need much encouragement to sit open when placed on a flat surface. The main text runs to 337 pages. There’s no original introduction, but an author’s preface as well as a special afterword to the Folio edition. At the back is a very helpful glossary and index, as well as a section of notes and further reading.
Turning to the text, The Secret Life of Trees is divided into four parts. The first deals with what trees are (it’s more complicated than it sounds), the second is essentially a catalogue of all the world’s trees, the third discusses the way trees live with each other, with the wider natural world, and the fourth deals with their relationship with human beings. The book is absolutely bursting with information and is educational and enlightening. At times, especially in that middle third catalogue, the information approaches textbook density and it becomes difficult to absorb everything in protracted reading sessions. But Tudge does his best to inject interesting details while completing the impressive feat of touring all the tree-containing orders and their many interesting families and species.
There was one thing, thankfully confined to the book’s closing chapters, that rubbed me the wrong way. In response to his legitimate concerns about looming ecological and climate disasters, Tudge rejects modernity and the market-based society wholesale. His proposal is that we revert to a kind of eco-Marxist agrarian society where most people are employed in organic farming and arboriculture. Our current social structures are written-off as being driven purely by “cash” and greed to the detriment of all but a select few. I found this economically disingenuous—ignoring what markets actually do and their central role in liberating people from the twin evils of oppression and poverty, and politically naive—ignoring the obvious practical challenges of winning support for such a hard-line position. I suspect that an appeal for readers to be conscientious stewards and champions of the natural environment would have more readily won willing support from many of the book’s reader’s than a call to take up agroforestry. ■
Where to buy
You can search for and buy this edition on:
eBay US*, eBay UK*, AbeBooks US*, or AbeBooks UK*.
Or browse more generally for Folio Society books at:
eBay US*, eBay UK*, AbeBooks US*, or AbeBooks UK*.
* These are affiliate links. Buying a book via one of these links produces a modest revenue for this site at no additional cost to you. Any revenue thus generated is recycled into supporting the activities of this site.
The Ubiquitous Book blog 