A friend whose computer had gone down called the other day for an address for a thank-you note, and it made me realize how dependent we have all gotten on storing and acquiring information online. Just days earlier, I was thumbing through my mother’s leather-bound address book, thinking about all the information gathered there —friends, carpenters and electricians, family members. It reminded me of old garden notebooks that people kept of their plants. In my mother’s book, each entry signified somebody who had contributed in some way to her life. Like the plants in our gardens, some were still with us, others were extant no longer, but together they chronicled something more significant. There was something nice about things not being lost to the ethernet as one went from page to page.
I had the same thought when I arrived home to find in my mail “The Essential Tree Selection Guide” by Henrik Sjornan and Arit Anderson. I had gotten so accustomed to looking up trees and plants online that I had forgotten the pleasure of having a compendium of them bound together in a volume which I could thumb through, sometimes in search of information, but also sometimes as a way of daydreaming and thinking about the garden without endless typing and staring at a screen.
The book is exciting on several levels because it is not simply a guide to trees for one’s garden. The first three sections of the book explore topics relevant today and reminded me once again of the experts in my mother’s address book whom she could contact with questions on a variety of subjects. Sjornan and Anderson created more than a reference list; they have put together a book that helps us understand how to select trees that are right for our gardens in both their current and future states, how to examine what our needs and those of other garden inhabitants are, and to understand how trees will impact temperature, manage cold winter winds, mitigate summer heat, help absorb record rainfalls that flood our landscapes, and even reduce air pollution.
So many garden books have us think primarily of the aesthetics of plants and how they contribute to the garden whereas “The Essential Tree Selection Guide” teaches us to think more broadly about the plant’s needs, how its success depends on what is growing around it, and how it contributes to the habitat and environment that is evolving before our eyes. The authors make an argument that counters that of native plant purists—with changing weather patterns, it is wise not only to consider natives, but also plants that may deal better with changing conditions, such as hot, dry summers and periods of intense rainfall. In some examples, they show how trees growing in the crevices of mountains make ideal street trees where irrigation is minimal and root space is limited.
By digging deeper into how plants grow and what they can adapt to, the book sets a tone for how we can all learn to adapt and make wise choices about what we are planting for the present, and most importantly, for the years to come.
As we enter a new year, we are also entering a new age, where weather is providing challenges and requiring us to think more than superficially about what we want to —and can—grow in our gardens. As I ponder the selections in the final section of the book, which is a list of a variety of species and genera and how they contribute to the environment and how they respond to a variety of conditions, I only hope that other volumes on shrubs and perennials make their way onto my bookshelf to help me with the challenges of gardening in a changing world.
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A gardener grows through observation, experimentation, and learning from the failures, triumphs, and hard work of oneself and others. In this sense, all gardeners are self-taught, while at the same time intrinsically connected to a tradition and a community that finds satisfaction through working the soil and sharing their experiences with one another. This column explores those relationships and how we learn about the world around us from plants and our fellow gardeners.
