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Book Review
| Nature, Culture, and Big Old Trees: Live Oaks and Ceibas in the Landscape of Louisiana and Guatemala. By Kit Anderson. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. xiii +183 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $45.00, paper $19.95
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| This book is a fun read, ideal for a summer afternoon. There is something about big old trees that commands respect to the point of reverence and this book captures it all. The book is about two taxa: the live oaks that dominate the coastal Louisiana landscape and the ceibas, the signature tree of the Guatemalan lowlands. In a way, we as humans identify with them, even across cultures, and they are "trees as men walking" through time and across the landscape. |
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I have known both from my years at Tulane University in Louisiana (live oak—Quercus virginiana) and my field work in Guatemala (ceiba—ceiba pentandra). Of the thousands of plants that I know, why should these two stand out as special, as a pair? In 160 pages Kit Anderson sets the framework for why we feel this way toward these two taxa, which at their full maturity are both stately and elegant. Why should trees with large spreading branches be perceived as growing with dignified grace, when the branches sweep groundward as patriarchal? The text spends some time with the biology of these trees, their growth, their mature architecture, but the charm of the book is Anderson's attempt to capture, across two cultures, how people feel toward these trees. |
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The trees are visited and measured one by one in trips on rural market buses, and we as readers are drawn in to the narrative of field studies. The trees cannot speak for themselves, but the author has drawn out from both cultures people to speak for the trees. Large trees have an importance and mystical appreciation where humans often give them more recognition and respect than other plants and even younger trees of the same taxa. This book is part geography, part botany, part anthropology and the whole is welded into a delightful read that feels like a conversation with the trees themselves. |
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These old big trees have a power over us, or do we read too much into them for being both old and big? This is an excellent gift book because it grapples with why we as humans behave the way we do toward big, old trees. |
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Garrison Wilkes is an economic botanist who has studied for forty years the wild relatives of corn and their role in the origin of corn, the number one crop plant of the Americas. |
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