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What kind of tree is that? Whether you’re hiking in the woods or simply sitting in your backyard, from Maine to New York you’ll never be without an answer to that question, thanks to this handy companion to the trees of the Northeast. Featuring detailed information and illustrations covering each phase of a tree’s lifecycle, this indispensable guidebook explains how to identify trees by their bark alone—no more need to wait for leaf season. Chapters on the structure and ecology of tree bark, descriptions of bark appearance, an easy-to-use identification key, and supplemental information on non-bark characteristics—all enhanced by more than 450 photographs, illustrations, and maps—will show you how to distinguish the textures, shapes, and colors of bark to recognize various tree species, and also understand why these traits evolved. 

Whether you’re a professional naturalist or a parent leading a family hike, this new edition of Bark: A Field Guide to Trees of the Northeast is your essential guide to the region’s 67 native and naturalized tree species.

Drawing on philosophers and poets with a passion for botany, this book shows that the study of plants has always been a study of language as much as of living things.

At a moment when environmental thought is struggling to move beyond inherited assumptions about nature and humanity’s place within it, Botany by the Book offers a new perspective on the history of ecological thinking. Bringing together a diverse range of writers, it uncovers a long and largely forgotten tradition of “green philology” in which empirical inquiry and literary reflection developed side by side. Figures such as Locke, Rousseau, Goethe, Mill, Dickinson, Akhmatova, Luxemburg, Celan, and Heidegger were avid botanizers, collecting specimens and in some cases meticulously curating herbaria. Spanning centuries, this hidden conversation links poets, philosophers, and naturalists whose intellectual kinship was often stronger than they themselves realized.

Tracing a line from Carl Linnaeus’s love of metaphor to Emily Dickinson’s adolescent herbarium to the contemporary politics of floral aesthetics, Jan Mieszkowski reveals how efforts to conceptualize plant life raise fundamental questions about power and knowledge. He also takes up contemporary writers, such as Hanif Abdurraqib and Ross Gay, whose flower poems refuse to play by the rules. Ultimately, Mieszkowski shows that botany has inspired a green philology, its distinctive reflections on language and epistemology offering fertile soil for ecocriticism today. Going beyond traditional distinctions between the sciences and the humanities, Botany by the Book argues that reckoning honestly with how we represent nature is inseparable from imagining more livable ecological futures.

Trees are not just natural resources; they are also cultural ones that present unique challenges and opportunities for public historians. Trees can serve as important objects of memory, recalling past triumphs or tragedies. They can be the last living witness to important events or community stories. Trees can also be objects of preservation, sometimes as individuals, other times as stands or even forests, all of which can take on historical significance for people, sites, and institutions. But as living entities they defy the kind of permanent legal preservation applicable to buildings and other non-living historical objects. Furthermore, their organic fragility can actually make them significant problems for historical sites and local preservation activities. For example, communities have had to cope with extensive tree loss from storm and fire damage, and dying trees can drop limbs or topple over, creating considerable danger to people and resources. Climate-change-driven increasing storm intensity has also highlighted the ways that trees—however historical or beloved—can become considerable threats.

The fourteen new essays in this volume explore the many ways that trees are an integral part of public history practice and sites. The authors draw on a range of approaches and historiographies to look at how memories of race-based hate, patriotic stories, community identities, and changed places have all centered on trees. In addition to contributions from the volume editors, this collection features scholarship by Sonja Dümpelmann Andrew Hurley, Carolyn M. Barske Crawford, Brian Dempsey, Liz Sargent, Sasha Coles, Mariaelena DiBenigno, Evan Haefeli, Krista McCracken, Alena Pirok, Christian Kosmas Mayer Alaina Scapicchio, and David Glassberg.