Classic Book Outlines Heritage of American Trees
Review of Donald Peattie’s “A Natural History of Western Trees”
Oct 9, 2009
Donald Culross Peattie wrote his 750-page natural history guide in 1950. But even with today’s conservation awareness, this book provides a rare and inspiring view of American’s long interaction with their vast western forests.
Like botanical field guides, A Natural History of Western Trees is organized with a chapter for each native tree found westward from the Rocky Mountains. Among the hundreds outlined are the Coast Redwoods and Sequoias of California, Western Hemlocks, Sitka Spruce and Douglas Fir of the Pacific Northwest, the Desert Ironwoods and Mesquites of the Southwest, the Hawthorns, Oaks and Alders of the region, plus the endless firs and pines and broadleaf trees that hide among the more common species.
Inspiring Prose and Vivid Images
But this book goes much further. After a brief botanical description of range, leaf shape, bark, flower and fruit or seed characteristics, Peattie provides an inspiring essay of these trees based on long observation and study. Identifying characteristics come in vivid images of the trees bending in wind or under a load of winter snow, persisting in desolate landscapes, or blooming in the dark of night. Each species comes to life in its habitat under Peattie’s careful prose.
The Western Hemlock, for example, is described with its rather short, but numerous needles and close-set branches:
“The tiny needles by the millions thus cast some of the densest shade thrown by a conifer and, where the Hemlock grows thickly, the forest floor may not see many sunbeams from one month to the next.”
Forestry and Conservation
The history of western forestry and lumbermen is also painted in detail, along with the societies that grew up around the forestry industry.
Also outlined are the particular uses people found for western trees – Hemlock for paper, Sitka Spruce for airplanes, and the Redwoods and Sequoias to satisfy an almost endless array of human needs. The development of technology for cutting and processing is traced, along with statistics on the vast number of “board feet” taken from forests up until the publication of the book.
Peattie was well aware of the sustainability problems with this logging. He calls for forest conservation as he traces the roots of the still-active Save-the-Redwoods League, founded in 1918 to halt the devastation already apparent in that early year.
The latest edition includes a 1991 introduction by contemporary nature writer Robert Finch.
Science and Poetry
Peattie’s reverence for his subject is evident throughout, along with his knowledge as a scientist. Enhancing the pages are the graceful woodcut illustrations of Paul Landacre.
This book is a rare marriage of scientific accuracy and poetic literature.
Peattie was a botanist and nature journalist, as well as the author of numerous books on natural history. A Natural History of Western Trees is a companion book to his similar volume, A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America. He died in 1964.
Publication Details:
A Natural History of Western Trees, by Donald Culross Peattie, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, 1990 (first printing 1950), 750 pages, $21.00.
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