Trees are “the heartbeat of the world,” writes Daniel Lewis in Twelve Trees, his love letter to the ancient, life-giving beings with which we share this planet. In 12 chapters, each paired with a beautiful illustration, Lewis takes readers on an arboreal journey around the world and through time. The characters—ebony, sandalwood, ceiba, redwood and so on—quickly come to feel like old friends, their long life histories carefully told and the stakes of their uncertain futures in the Anthropocene clearly laid out. Each tree raises big questions—how should conservationists balance the bulbous baobab’s survival against that of the thirsty endangered elephants that destroy it for water? Is an invasive tree inherently bad, in a world so thoroughly transformed and reshuffled by humans? For instance, the non-native blue gum eucalyptus, omnipresent across California, is highly flammable, but it also provides critical habitat for the endangered monarch butterfly.

Throughout the book, Lewis weaves in memoir, connecting his own roots with those of the trees he profiles. The toromiro, extinct on its home island of Rapa Nui but preserved in a diaspora of botanical collections around the world, reminds the author of his own migration from Hawaii to the mainland United States—like a buoyant, salt-resistant seed on the waves. His experience as curator and historian at the famed Huntington Library comes in handy on a visit to an archive of another sort, the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research in Arizona—where he comes face to face with Prometheus, a 5,062-year-old Great Basin bristlecone pine that gave its life to transform dendrochronologists’ understanding of the ancient past. It’s hard to read Twelve Trees, to flip through its wood-pulp pages, and not see the world differently after. Lewis puts it best: “Trees are Earth’s reporters, chronicling life and change over the long, elastic curve of history. All we need to do is listen up.” —Christian Elliott

• 304 pages
• Hardcover