The Man Who Plants Trees, by Jim Robbins – review

Remember the ‘Plant a Tree in ’73’ campaign? Forty years on, has anyone inquired into what happened to all those trees and how many are still alive? Since then, planting amenity trees has grown into an industry, and turns out to have its down sides. One is that little trees are imported in industrial quantities from other countries, as if they were cars or tins of paint, and inevitably bring with them foreign pests and diseases which destroy established trees. Globalisation of tree diseases has overtaken climate change and too many deer to become the number one threat to the world’s trees and forests.

This book, by a scientific journalist, is a miscellany of what people, especially Americans, think about trees and the virtues that they ascribe to them. Insofar as it has a theme, it is a biography of David Milarch, a colourful and mystical American nurseryman with a passion for cloning (taking cuttings of) special trees — either ‘champion’ (specially big) trees, or very old trees, or in some other way ‘good’ individuals. These are supposed to create a new generation of champion or ancient or good trees, after global warming has done its worst.

I share Milarch’s and Robbins’s love of special trees and desire to perpetuate them, but as a scientist I have my doubts. Whether a tree becomes champion or ancient or good depends on many factors, environmental and human, as well as its DNA. I fear that cloning will not resolve the globalisation of disease or the deer problem. English Elm, the common elm of south and west England, was a champion tree, cloned by people for centuries — and proved disastrously susceptible to the 1970s strain of Dutch Elm Disease. I fail to follow why cloning special trees should be the answer to climate change: if you want genes for resistance to global warming, why not go to the southern limit of a tree’s geographical range, where the climate is warm already?

Don’t believe everything this book says.