David Suzuki & Wayne Grady: Tree - a biography

Zoologist and broadcaster David Suzuki's admiration for a windbent tree near his beach cottage led him to look up from animals long enough to write this fascinating book about a plant. He marvels how the misshapen tree which began its life "around the time that Shakespeare began writing King Lear" and yet lives precariously, because it has to deal with fire, unexpected storms, drought and predators, and spread its seeds, without being able to move.

Suzuki's enthusiasm and wonderment are infectious. He creates a fictional "everytree" on North America's northwest coast, a Douglas-fir like the one by his cottage, and recounts how it was born in the cauldron of a massive forest fire, then literally spiralled upwards towards the sun, turning light into food for the whole planet for centuries, before succumbing to infestation by insects and fungus, as "no tree dies of old age and no tree lives forever".

No tree is an island either — they may be rooted to the spot but, to quote Suzuki quoting John Fowles, "far more than ourselves, trees are social creatures" and he uses some surprising facts to show us how.

They share minerals and pollen, but also warnings of danger — if one tree is infected by leaf-eating caterpillars, other trees in the vicinity know to "crank up" their immune system. Some even communicate with "bodyguards" — wild tobacco plants being eaten alive by hawkmoth caterpillars emit certain smells that attract hawkmoth-egg-eating insects. So this is really the story of the whole forest, rather than one lone tree, and includes descriptions of salamanders, bears and spotted owls.

Suzuki reveals the chemical reasons for the ecosystem's behaviour — salmon and bears turn out to be vitally important to Douglas-firs' food chain due to the scarcity of nitrogen. Chlorophyll turns out to be a remarkably similar compound to blood. The history of botany, of how humans discovered what we know about trees, is touched upon as well.

It's intriguing — after being taught organism classifications at school as if they were received wisdom from above — to consider how people first decided to sort out the chaos of living things into such structures.

The book's descriptions of what happens inside a tree are slightly too technical and some diagrams would have been useful, but for the most part this is a beautifully written account of a "bystander" organism. Trees turn out to have as many secrets as the rest of us — it's just that they're usually better at keeping them quiet.

* Janet McAllister is a canvas feature writer.
* Allen & Unwin, $35