Fran: P is for Pakenham

Because I’d heard an interview with her on NPR, I set out to read Beth Moon’s photographic book Ancient Trees: Portraits of Time (2014) (http://www.bethmoon.com/TouchWood00.html) but I ended up reading Thomas Pakenham’s Remarkable Trees of the World (2002).  Blame the West Hartford Public Library which puts recently returned books on carts for browsing and my lousy memory for names.

I did take time to look at Beth Moon’s work and while I like the images of trees, they are not my favorites; of the plant works, I loved the Savage Garden series (plants that lure in insects for food and pollination) and the Odin’s Cove series (Man, ravens are expressive birds!).  Her style is more generally surreal which didn't seem to work as well for the Trees.

Thomas Pakenham’s book is much more casual, a traveler’s writing and a traveler’s photographs.  He wants to give you scale and often climbs over barriers to do so.  The photographs are meant to make you go “wow”, less with a sense of art than with a sense of “what a cool tree”.  The writing that accompanies each is full of little tidbit facts (often measurements) and lore and often anecdotes of his visit.

Packenham, an historian, is clearly fond of the 19^th century naturalists who paved the way for traveling and documenting; Alexander von Humboldt features prominently because some of the trees he wrote about and drew are still around!  The dragon tree at Orotava, Tenerife has a great back story as he goes looking for von Humboldt’s tree, finding a similar one a mere 30’ in girth instead of the 35’ reported.  When he writes about the Kalahari baobab known as Green’s tree because of the expedition having carved its name and 1858, he says “The world and his wife had followed and they had added their signatures—all except Livingstone.  I liked Livingstone for that.  He is rather a hero of mine—he behaved better to Africans than most of his fellow Europeans—and I was glad to find he behaved better to trees.”  (not a bit of a pathetic Anglophile, why do you ask?)  Packenham often hits my historical imagination as I see the ways in which transplanted trees shape trade and culture in their new homes.

I liked the colloquial style—I often had the response Packenham wanted of “Oh cool!”  Learning that dragon trees don’t have rings like other trees, that baobabs could be hollowed out (and indeed one served as a bar back in 1880s South Africa), that there are genetic mutations that reproduce as corkscrew beeches in Verzy France, that there are 4600 year old trees, was fun.  The section on trees as shrines (the Bo tree of the Buddha, etc.) is somewhat disappointing—as if Packenham’s historian hat was a little too tight to marvel too spiritually.  There are some editorial choices I wouldn’t have made—brown line drawings under some of the text is often intrusive; sometimes the photograph is spread over a page and a bit, resulting in the spine cutting into an image.  On the whole, though, a lovely coffee table book of our majestic—and remarkable—trees.