Jean Giono’s The Man Who Planted Trees (original French L’homme qui plantait des arbres) is a tiny masterpiece of moral imagination: an elegant parable that compresses a century’s worth of catastrophe and repair into a single, quietly luminous tale. First published in 1953, the story trades the grandiloquence of polemic for the modesty of witness, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono
The Adaptable Educator’s book Review – Trees, A Celebration edited by Jill Fairchild
Jill Fairchild’s Trees: A Celebration is less a single narrative than a curated chorus of voices, images, and meditations that together compose an arboreal anthology. As its title suggests, the book is not meant merely to instruct or classify, but to honor. What distinguishes this work from more conventional botanical texts is the way it operates at … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s book Review – Trees, A Celebration edited by Jill Fairchild
The Adaptable Educator’s book Review – Tree: A Life Story by David Suzuki & Wayne Grady
David Suzuki & Wayne Grady’s Tree, A Life Story stages a quiet but insistent argument: to know a tree is to know a world. At once elegy, primer, and manifesto, the book reframes arboreal biography as a mode of ethical attention. Suzuki’s scientific gravitas and Grady’s narrative tact combine to make a book that is neither pure … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s book Review – Tree: A Life Story by David Suzuki & Wayne Grady
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession by Amy Stewart
Amy Stewart’s The Tree Collectors – Tales of Arboreal Obsession is a masterful fusion of natural history, biography, and cultural critique, offering a multifaceted portrait of humanity’s enduring fixation with trees. Rather than a linear narrative, Stewart assembles a compendium of “tales”—ranging from Renaissance botanists who risked everything to sketch exotic saplings, to modern-day activists … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession by Amy Stewart
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – If Trees Could Talk: Life Lessons from the Wisdom of the Woods by Holly Worton
Holly Worton’s If Trees Could Talk artfully weaves poetic reflection, personal narrative, and ecological insight into a tapestry that encourages readers to listen more attentively to the natural world. At once intimate and expansive, Worton’s prose invites us to regard trees not merely as silent sentinels of our landscape but as teachers bearing vital lessons about resilience, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – If Trees Could Talk: Life Lessons from the Wisdom of the Woods by Holly Worton
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard
In Finding the Mother Tree, ecologist Suzanne Simard invites readers into the hidden, exquisite communication network of forests, weaving together rigorous science, personal memoir, and a call to 're-conceive' humanity’s relationship with the natural world. The result is neither dry technical treatise nor sentimental nature writing, but a compelling hybrid that marries empirical inquiry with a … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review: Our Green Heart – The Soul and Science of Forests by Diana Beresford-Kroeger
In Our Green Heart - The Soul and Science of Forests, Diana Beresford-Kroeger masterfully intertwines the poetic reverence of a naturalist with the analytical rigour of a scientist. The result is a work that not only illuminates the ecological intricacies of forests but also ignites a profound moral and spiritual call to action. This book is … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review: Our Green Heart – The Soul and Science of Forests by Diana Beresford-Kroeger
In the thick off it – A thicket: A Photo Safari in 2022
In the dog days of August, one hopes for a reprieve from the noon-day heat in the shade of trees. This reprieve doesn't come easily on suburban walks along the older main roads... while searching for some shade, I noticed how these cedar hedges were trimmed so aggressively on the road side. I had stop … Continue reading In the thick off it – A thicket: A Photo Safari in 2022
Under the Greyness – A Photo Safari in 2022
Get in really close and see what has been happening to the trunk of this old tree... bug burrowing and pursued by clever woodpeckers... racoons and squirrels ripping off the back to get something beneath... moss, mold, and fungi slowly decomposing the tree and adding their creative ouches of colour to the composition... 've been … Continue reading Under the Greyness – A Photo Safari in 2022
A little good news — about protecting old trees
http://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/the-25000-monumental-trees-of-italy-are-old-habitats-shrouded-in-legend/ I recently had to have a hundred year old sugar maple tree cut down in front of my house. It was diseased and rotten from the core out, so it was dangerous. However, while I was waiting for an available tree doctor to determine it's fate, I got an eyeful of how old treen … Continue reading A little good news — about protecting old trees
The New Renaissance Mindset 