Arbor Day Reads

National Arbor Day is observed annually on the last Friday in April (4/29 this year), although South Carolina marks its own Arbor Day on the first Friday in December, since saplings planted at that time of year will have a better chance of becoming established before the brutal heat of summer arrives.

Books on trees are enjoying something of a vogue just now, which was kicked off a few years ago by German forester Peter Wohlleben’s best-selling The Hidden Life of Trees, in which he made startling claims for the intelligence and even the social lives of trees.  (He followed it up with The Heartbeat of Trees, about the importance of the human bond with nature and trees in particular.)

Another notable recent tree book is forest ecologist Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree, which looks at the role of certain trees in supporting and sustaining forests as a whole.  (Simard was the inspiration for a central character in Richard Powers’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Overstory.)

The following list includes explorations of the latest in tree science, identification guides, books on tree care and selection, cultural studies, and more.