Amy Stewart is the New York Times bestselling author of The Drunken Botanist, Wicked Plants and most recently The Tree Collectors which includes a look at former US poet laureate W. S. Merwin who planted a tree almost every day for more than three decades. Nate Pederson talked to her about her work and its connections to book collecting.
Please introduce us to your new book – what is tree collecting, who are tree collectors, and what inspired you to profile them?
The new book is The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession. I met a guy about 10 years ago who told me that he collected trees. I thought trees were a strange thing to collect. They’re awfully big, and hard to move, even harder than books. He explained that he was trying to collect one of every kind of tree that would grow in Lancaster, PA where he lived. I thought that was an interesting idea, and over the years I met a few more tree collectors.
Finally, after about the fourth tree collector came my way, I realized I could write a book about them. I interviewed tree collectors from all over the world, and found people who collect in a variety of ways – not everybody has a large plot of land where they can plant enormous trees. I included people who collect parts of trees, like pine cones or acorns, and people who catalog trees akin to bibliographers, and so on.
What similarities do you see between tree and book collectors?
Tree collectors, like book collectors, tend to have some kind of focus. They want to grow one of every species of oak tree, for instance. Some tree collectors are sentimental so their collection consists of trees planted in honor of people they love. Or they collect historical trees, which basically means growing the offspring of a tree associated with a historically significant person or place, like a tree from Mount Vernon maybe.
Tree collectors also catalog their trees, and they have the added difficulty of needing a way to keep track of exactly where the trees are. Labels and tags can get lost in the outdoors. GPS coordinates can help with this, but it’s surprisingly tricky to get this right.
Tree collectors also join tree collecting societies (the maple society, the conifer society, etc), swap trees with fellow collectors, and buy trees from rare tree dealers. Some rare tree dealers even handle estates. When a tree collector dies or downsizes, some of those trees can actually be sold off to other collectors. So many similarities!
How about differences?
Well, as one collector put it to me, with trees you have this added element of time. You plant a sapling today, and wait 20 years. Your trees will outlive you. Another tree collector said “everything I collected before was about the past, where I’d been, what I’d done, collecting trees is about the future”.
Are you a tree collector or a book collector yourself?
I’m not a collector, really. After being married to a book collector for so long [Scott Brown from Downtown Brown Books] and knowing many collectors, I do believe that there’s such a thing as a collector’s personality. I’m not saying it’s genetic, just that some people are into collecting and some people are not. I recently went on a little birding outing with our local Bird Alliance and I realized that the serious birders are also collectors. They have that same enthusiasm for knowing the finer points, understanding how birds are categorized and named, and filling out their lists. I was just wandering around going “Oh cool, a bird.” I like to hang out with birders so they can tell me what bird I’m looking at, but I just don’t have that drive to know, for instance, all the fine distinctions between the 12 different warblers that might be found in Portland this time of year. That’s a thing collectors get into.
What can book collectors learn from tree collectors? Conversely, what can tree collectors learn from book collectors?
I suspect that tree collectors are more social than book collectors. They go on field trips or plan international trips to look at trees, and of course they do some things that book collectors also do, hang out in online forums, hold swap meets or seminars, and stay in touch via organizations who publish newsletters and hold annual meetings. I could be wrong about this, but I do think book collectors might be missing out on some of the socializing that tree collectors enjoy.
I would also say that both groups could benefit from trying to widen their appeal and welcome newcomers. I know this is a challenge that any organization or society or area of interest has to grapple with. In order for me to include people from all over the world, from many cultural backgrounds and income levels, I really had to broaden the idea of what it meant to “collect” trees. For instance, I went looking on TikTok and YouTube for people who were really into trees in some unconventional way, and who weren’t a part of any traditional horticultural society. That’s just one example, but I think that anything people can do to take down barriers, do away with gatekeeping, and be more flexible and open, will just help to keep things interesting and bring along the next generation.
This post was originally published on here
