by Stefan Mancuso (translated by Gregory Conti)
Profile Books, 2023
Stefan Mancuso would like all of us to pay more attention to trees. He’s a plant neurobiologist (a self-proclaimed “botany nerd”) who teaches at the University of Florence. In Tree Stories, a collection of eight nonfiction stories, he describes the many ways that plants – trees especially – fit in to our lives. To make his case, Mancuso offers a multitude of reasons, not the least of which is that planting and growing more trees is perhaps the most efficient way to combat climate change. But as we journey with him on his global travels, we find many surprises. Mancuso says he sees plants everywhere, but wonders if most of us look past them. This book is his effort to correct that collective oversight.
For example, Mancuso describes red spruce, which has provided some instrument makers with the materials to fashion violins and related string instruments, such as those made by the legendary Antonio Stradivari. He writes specifically about prized European red spruce trees from the region of Trentino Alto Aldige in Italy, many of which were lost to windstorms in 2018.
Mancuso describes almost-forgotten “liberty trees” in France, which people began planting in 1790, and their connection to the past in which large forest trees were moved to cities, with all the difficulty that entailed. Mancuso discovers that these trees (also called “fraternity trees”) represented networks, joining towns to each other, as tree roots join forest trees, one to the other. He also describes the early use of tree biology in the forensic investigation for the Lindbergh kidnapping case, and the search for the oldest trees on Earth (including the unwarranted cutting down of an ancient bristlecone pine, ironically for the purpose of assessing its age: more than 4,600 years), along with the explanation of the process for carbon-dating wood.
One of the interesting discussions in this book is how some cut tree stumps can remain alive, with living tissue throughout the stump, often because of their underground connections to other trees. Expanding on this, Mancuso explains the growing scientific realization of forest trees as more than individuals, with root grafting that allows trees to connect to other trees, sometimes nearby but also at surprising distances, creating what are, more or less, “superorganisms.”
Mancuso takes great pains to describe how plant research is still a “poor cousin” to the work done on animals, with only a tiny percentage of funding and resulting published science devoted to trees and other plants. Throughout the book, he returns to his theme of people overlooking trees and other plants, despite how ubiquitous and integral they are to day-to-day life. If Mancuso displays a prejudice, it may be that he spends a bit too much space on this perceived unfairness. None of that diminishes the value of this book, however, and reflects Mancuso’s passion for his topic. As he reminds us, we live on “a planet of plants” – and we depend on them, every one of us.