Elderflora
A Modern History of Ancient Trees
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- £12.99
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- £12.99
Publisher Description
The epic story of the planet’s oldest trees and the making of the modern world
Humans have always revered long-lived trees. But as historian Jared Farmer reveals in Elderflora, our veneration took a modern turn in the eighteenth century, when naturalists embarked on a quest to locate and precisely date the oldest living things on earth. The new science of tree time prompted travelers to visit ancient specimens and conservationists to protect sacred groves. Exploitation accompanied sanctification, as old-growth forests succumbed to imperial expansion and the industrial revolution.
Taking us from Lebanon to New Zealand to California, Farmer surveys the complex history of the world’s oldest trees, including voices of Indigenous peoples, religious figures, and contemporary scientists who study elderflora in crisis. In a changing climate, a long future is still possible, Farmer shows, but only if we give care to young things that might grow old.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Farmer (On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape) offers a winning history of the world's oldest trees. Ancient trees, he suggests, have sparked reverence and preservation efforts for centuries, and to that end he traces "the scientific search for the world's oldest living thing." In the 1700s, French naturalist Michael Adanson was fascinated by the extremely old baobab trees in Africa, and, more recently, the exact coordinates of the oldest living tree, in California, are kept secret to "protect the pine from harm." (Though the oldest trees, Farmer notes, may in fact be the Cedars of Lebanon, which feature in the Torah and the Epic of Gilgamesh.) The desire to quantify and measure nature can have destructive consequences, Farmer posits, and his melancholy conclusion is informed by the destruction inherent in humans' relationship with plants: "The oldest living thing ever known to science succumbed to male knowledge seekers. Indeed, it was killed in the act of knowing," he writes of a tree cut down in 1964. Farmer masterfully blends science, religion, and history, making for a beautiful and moving portrait of nature over time. Fans of Suzanne Simard's Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest should give this a look.
