A Natural History of North American Trees by Donald Culross Peattie
483 pages
Published 1950 (Volume 1) and 1953 (Volume 2), condensed and edited one volume edition published 2007
Read from August 28 to September 3
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
The
prominence of "natural history" in the title led me to expect rather
more, well, natural history content in this volume, a substantial amount
of material on the ecology of each species and a better sense of their
taxonomic interrelationships at the very least. While there is some such
material, written in such fetchingly high-flown prose as to make the
entire read feel like a sunshine-splashed drive along California
mountain roads in a Studebaker Champion convertible, far too much of the
book (for my tastes) is devoted to bald facts and figures of industrial
exploitation. Peattie's message is definitely one of mingled
conservation and sustainable forestry, but I can only read so many 65
year old statistics on board feet before my eyes glaze over. And as this
is a clipped and hedged edition of Peattie's two-volume opus, I get the
sense that many of the minor or more marginal woods -- often those I
find most interesting, from my own inimical fondness for biogeographical
history and oddity -- were quietly left out. My favorite sections were
on geographically or temporally isolate species, such as stray tropical
genera represented by a single North American species or a
once-widespread fossil family now clinging on in a single remnant
population. I wonder how many of those trees got left out of this
fashionably streamlined edition.
Some modern maps and taxonomic
diagrams would have been appreciated, too, but I suppose what I want
then is a modern textbook on plant biogeography, not a somewhat
forgotten classic of nature writing.
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